This release introduces significant performance optimizations, new data lifecycle management capabilities, and greater administrative control over system resources. Key improvements include a 10% performance boost for metadata operations, faster IAM policy evaluation, and the ability to track object access times to support tiered storage strategies.

### New Features

-   Introduced object access time tracking to enable data lifecycle management policies, such as identifying and archiving inactive data. This optional feature is enabled via the `MINIO_LAZY_ACCESS_TIME` environment variable. (#1058)

### Improvements

-   Optimized the metadata cache, delivering up to a 10% performance increase for common metadata operations like object listing. (#1070)
-   Accelerated the IAM policy evaluation engine for significantly faster authorization checks, especially in environments with a large number of policies. (#1063)
-   Enabled administrative control over inter-server connection limits to better manage resource consumption and prevent connection exhaustion in distributed deployments. (#1045)
-   Increased the default audit log batch size to 1 MB, improving logging performance and throughput in high-volume environments. (#1073)
-   Sped up the background data healing process by immediately skipping locked objects, ensuring faster completion of healing cycles. (#1041)
-   Enhanced Object Lambda compatibility to correctly process all `2xx` success codes, enabling more advanced and standard-compliant transformations. (#1065)
-   Extended the retention period for batch catalog reports to 60 days for long-term analysis and resolved an issue preventing their proper cleanup. (#1077)
-   Improved client-side error reporting to provide more precise diagnostics for issues like timeouts and disconnections, simplifying troubleshooting. (#1055)

### Bug Fixes

-   Resolved a race condition in the data streaming layer to prevent resource leaks during high-concurrency operations. (#1078)
-   Fixed an issue in the distributed locking system that could cause premature release of read locks under concurrent loads. The `mc admin lock list` command now includes a `Last Refresh` time for improved diagnostics. (#1072)
-   Prevented a potential server crash when removing a peer cluster in a site replication configuration. (#1052)
-   Batch catalog jobs now validate bucket names on startup and fail immediately with a clear error, preventing unresponsive jobs. (#1076)
-   Corrected batch catalog generation to accurately include object replication status in its output. (#1062)
-   The server now correctly loads TLS private keys with extra whitespace, preventing startup failures from common formatting issues. (#1069)
-   Corrected the `Total` count in paginated administrative API responses to accurately reflect filtered results. (#1081)
-   Clarified batch catalog job status by consolidating `lastBucketScanned` and `lastBucketMatched` into a single `bucket` field. **Note:** Scripts parsing this JSON output may require updates. (#1075)
-   Corrected the object count metric in batch catalog jobs to ensure reporting accuracy. (#1066)
-   Updated the web-based Console to improve UI stability and address minor bugs. (#1057, #1083)

### Breaking Changes

-   The software license has been changed from GNU AGPLv3 to the Minio Commercial License. Review the new license terms to ensure compliance with usage, modification, and distribution rights. (#1039)