About 5% of seeded headers are fragments. They went through staging, where they waited 30 minutes for parts that were never coming (the neighbouring range is worked on by another node, often hours later) and expired: the staging table grew to 22 GB and the NVMe part of the database reached its 60 GB limit, which stopped leasing and the backfill. Files cut by a range edge can still be completed by the neighbouring range, so fragments within 50k articles of an edge go straight into binaries and parts; the rest, files with articles missing for good, are dropped. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>