In #66682 we saw significant performance problems in Raft causing constant elections and stuck ranges. It turned out this was caused by the 1000 key readahead in MVCCIterate:

The caller had passed an iterator function that was supposed to terminate early (in that case after the first entry), but this is only called after the 1000 entries have been fetched:

In #66816 @nvanbenschoten notes:

I considered removing the readahead behavior in MVCCIterate entirely. I think it might have been added to avoid repeat CGo hops back when we had RocksDB. But now that we have Pebble and can manipulate an iterator cheaply, it can maybe be rejected. However, this would then require us to lift some logic from pebbleMVCCScanner into MVCCIterate, which I wasn't keen on doing.

@petermattis adds:

+1 to doing this. Or to removing MVCCIterate entirely. Now that we don't have to minimize cgo crossings I don't see the point of MVCCIterate vs using an MVCCIterator.

Jira issue: CRDB-8248