Measured on wapp warm, modes interleaved and repeated: pack is ~8.5s fast, ~9.5s safe, ~10.7s small, and the read path is 0.31/0.33/0.36 with leaves at 0.01s in all three. So fast buys ~12% on writes and nothing measurable on reads.

The '599ms fast against 15.2s safe, ~25x' this file carried reproduces in neither the ratio nor the absolutes; the delta encoder's search was reworked since it was taken. Left uncorrected it would have justified almost any correctness cost, which is the expensive kind of stale number to leave in a comment that decides the shipped build. check-in: 6181a57e0c user: dmestas tags: trunk