repeater field pages explosion that I cannot understand

[rajo]

I'm sorry I cannot give examples and have very little clue what's happening.  Did I change a flag months ago? Did I experiment and save something wrong in a config somewhere? I don't know, but this is what's happening:

Thousands of pages are created over time (months). They appear to be repeater "ready pages". The pages are of status 3073 (statusOn | statusHidden | statusUnpublished).  They are children of legit pages, but invisible, yet dragging every query down to the point of timing PHP out.  The template is a repeater field w/ 2 fields in it.  There is no data in the field_* tables for these pages; there are only pages rows, lots of them!

Using version 2.5.3.

To clean is up I do:

delete pages WHERE templates_id=245 and status=3073

and the noise goes away.  However I have no idea how the noise gets introduced over time... ?

There were 9,368 pages the last time I did this.

Here's the data for this template.  Any hint would be appreciated. 

thanks.

=== template row:

id : 245

name : repeater_boooking_price (sic)

fieldgroups_id : 299

flags : 8

cache_time : 0

data : {"noChildren":1,"noParents":1,"slashUrls":1,"noGlobal":1}

=== fieldgroups_fields rows:

fieldgroups_id : 299

fields_id : 344

sort : 0

fieldgroups_id : 299

fields_id : 337

sort : 1

=== fields row:

id : 345

type : FieldtypeRepeater

name : booking_price

flags : 0

name : -----

label : -----

data : {"template_id":245,"parent_id":1585,"repeaterReadyItems":3,"repeaterFields":[344,337]}

=== pages row:

id : 1585

parent_id : 1039

templates_id : 2

name : for-field-345

status : 17

sort : 1

name1258 :  

status1258 : 0

[rajo]

FYI, I now changed ready-to-edit from 3 to 0. This should make the crazy explosion of empties go away.  I notice in the noisy rows that they come in 3's, so...

It will make the problem go away, but I still don't have an explanation.  Oh well.  Onward.