This release introduces powerful new metrics for monitoring data integrity and significant performance enhancements for batch processing. Key updates focus on providing administrators with deeper operational insights and accelerating critical workflows, complemented by important fixes to improve storage efficiency and operational correctness.

### New Features

*   **Exposed detailed data integrity metrics via Prometheus** to provide a precise view of object shard health, enabling more informed hardware maintenance and proactive data healing. (#949)
*   **Enabled prefix-based scanning for Batch Catalog jobs**, dramatically accelerating job completion times on large buckets by targeting specific data subsets instead of performing a full scan. (#1122)

### Improvements

*   **Introduced an optional file preallocation feature** to improve write performance and reduce disk fragmentation for large objects on supported Linux/FreeBSD filesystems. (#1126)
*   **Optimized the deletion process for users and service accounts** in distributed deployments, reducing I/O load and improving system responsiveness during administrative tasks. (#1136)

### Bug Fixes

*   **Ensured `mc batch status` correctly resumes reporting progress** for ongoing jobs after a server restart, improving the reliability of long-running task monitoring. (#1134)
*   **Fixed a bug that left orphaned data directories on disk** after upload or delete operations, improving storage space utilization by ensuring temporary data is properly cleaned. (#1123)
*   **Improved the accuracy of the Object Summary admin API** to correctly report details for objects with mixed small (inline) and large versions. (#1131)
*   **Addressed an issue that caused read failures** for certain small, inlined objects in an erasure-coded environment, ensuring correct data access. (#1130)
*   **Ensured administrative scanning operations correctly target a specified storage pool** instead of unnecessarily scanning all pools, improving performance of targeted maintenance. (#1127)