walkLog reconstructed every manifest with log.content, which walks the delta chain from scratch. Check-in manifests are routinely stored as deltas against their neighbours, so the same base chain was re-resolved once per check-in -- work that grows with the history behind a node rather than with the node. Per-check-in cost climbed with repository size (0.5ms on libfossil against 2.2ms on sqlite) instead of staying flat.

Every other read path in this file already took #84's PlaintextCache; this one did not. Output is byte-identical -- contentCached is the same bytes, only less work.

log tip, min of repeated runs, warm, ReleaseFast:

pikchr 0.14s -> 0.04s wapp 0.05s -> 0.01s libfossil 1.26s -> 0.34s libspatialite 4.69s -> 2.28s fossil 19.36s -> 7.24s sqlite 59.70s -> 23.81s tcl 38.29s -> 5.99s