bvandeusen
76d8ad42a8
The cascade "burped" — chunks appeared unevenly — because the old pipeline coupled display to fetch timing: it trickled each batch right after its fetch and assumed the next round-trip would land inside the ~240ms trickle window. When a fetch ran long (TABLESAMPLE hits random, sometimes-cold blocks; RTT jitter) the animation starved, then a clump burst in. Decouple the two: - Producer (_fill) races ahead fetching batches into a buffer up to a target depth, refilling when it dips below BUFFER_MIN. - Consumer (_drain) reveals one item every CADENCE_MS regardless of when fetches land; it only waits if the buffer genuinely starves. A small PRIME buffer precedes the drain so it doesn't starve at the front; the buffer (BUFFER_MIN×CADENCE runway) absorbs per-fetch jitter so images appear at an even pace. Public store API (loadInitial/shuffle/fetchPage/ images/loading/hasMore/isEmpty) unchanged — ShowcaseView/MasonryGrid need no change. Test (fake timers): fire-order + dedup, one-item-per-cadence rate limit, empty-library flag. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>