> Why did you decide to only split the page into two parts?

I had originally planned to split into N, but Michael suggested that the benchmark is an append workload, and splitting into two parts is likely to be fairly much a subset of splitting into N parts. So.. I went with splitting into two, and then investigating whether a more general solution would be worthwhile.

So.. The motivations are append workloads and simpler skip list manipulations.

> It might be worth calling __wt_btree_leaf_create()

Ack. I like the idea - I will make the change today. __merge_new_page currently does more work than __wt_btree_leaf_create, so the change will take some shuffling.