@mflatt if an engine has a prefix and the number of ticks provided is not enough to complete the prefix, that seems likely to produce bad results

is that accurate?

The prefix could get interrupted by another prefix, and you’ll never make progress if each new prefix fails to complete. Did you have a worse effect in mind?

that’s the effect we saw

but if you have an engine that you want to run to completion, then writing a loop with a small but positive number of ticks may fail to complete, whereas a large number will complete

which @spall and I both found surprising

we’ll increase the number of ticks, though, and hopefully that will help us make progress in the larger sense