The settler marks a settled release's candidates ready (and unreadable when it had no readable name). Claims took the candidates by joining releases from random points of the queue; in its newer half nothing had settled, so a slice scanned to the end (0.3 s each, 20 slices and 5 tiers a claim) and the prober stood still: 2.4M waiting, 0 probed a minute. Now an index over the claimable rows only, the slices drawn within them. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>