Priming a serve snapshot copied every artifact's container out of the log into an in-memory store and held them there for the server's lifetime. The log had already been scanned and every frame CRC-checked to build the rid table, so the copy was a second full read whose only product was resident bytes: on a 254k-artifact repository it was two thirds of the prime time and a few hundred megabytes of RSS, all to re-hold what the log already holds.

The snapshot is now a log-backed store: an index of hash -> log location, and container bytes read from the log on demand as a round emits them, memoised only for the round and released after it. Persisted order is preserved so the clone pager still cursors correctly, the binary-digest to hex-wire-name conversion stays at its one site, and a read fault after the scan surfaces as a server storage error so a clone is never silently truncated. The old whole-store copy is retained only where it is actually needed: the pull client's holdings and the equivalence test's oracle.

Measured, 67499-artifact repository, ReleaseSafe: a clone off the indexed serve is byte-identical to a clone off the copy-based serve (both materialise all 983 files of trunk identically), while serve peak RSS falls from 157 MB to 32 MB. The one remaining O(store) cost, the startup scan itself, is a separate change. check-in: e17845e40d user: dmestas tags: trunk