Why is the readOnly Visualforce page attribute not working?

Question

Can anyone explain to me why the readOnly="true" attribute is not working as expected? I'm attempting to display a list of 5,000 records using an <apex:repeat> tag, and I'm receiving an error:

Collection size 5,000 exceeds maximum size of 1,000.

Code examples are below, but this should be working, as Salesforce documentation suggests:

the readOnly attribute also increases the maximum number of items in a collection that can be iterated over using components such as <apex:dataTable>, <apex:dataList>, and <apex:repeat>. This limit increased from 1,000 items to 10,000.

Controller Logic:

public List<Integer> bulkTest {get; set;}

bulkTest = new List<Integer>();
for ( Integer i = 0; i < 5000; i++){
    bulkTest.add(i);
}

Visualforce Page:

<apex:page controller="Bulk_Controller" readOnly="true">

    <apex:repeat value="{!bulkTest}" var="int" >
        <apex:outputText value="{!int}" />
    </apex:repeat>

</apex:page>

Answer 1

Turns out there's some strange behavior on ReadOnly in my use case.

If the PREVIOUS page was not marked as ReadOnly, the CURRENT page was not allowing me to retrieve more than 1,000 records. Adding a ReadOnly page with nothing but a OnLoad Javascript method, which calls an ActionFunction to take me to the next page fixes everything.

Answer 2

You can't iterate over a thousand records.

While the limit of 1000 items in collections was relaxed in Spring '10, there is still a limit of 1000 items that can be iterated over in VF pages. Generaly speaking, when displaying large collections to users, you should aim to paginate such large data sets. Part of this is just good UI design. The other part has to do with us needing to protect the infrastructure from having to render potentially huge pages.

From here: https://developer.salesforce.com/forums?id=906F0000000964gIAA