Making Pagination in Javascript Scalable (for large # of db results)

Question

I'm using the SilverStripe CMS/MVC Framework. My coder says that Pagination must be done with Javascript (instead of PHP) in this Framework. But now I'm a bit worried about scalability. If I understand correctly, this means that all the results are loaded at once (via php), and javascript is used to paginate these, so you only see 10 or some limited amount until you click the 'next' arrow. Works fine with the current 40 records for testing. But if there are 1,000 records in the database, or 100,000, and these all had to be preloaded before you could see even the first page of 10, then wouldn't this really slow things down? At what number of records might one start to see this slowdown? Any suggestions/ideas..?

Answer 1

At what number of records might one start to see this slowdown?

It depends, but it will slow down. Can be at 500 records, or 5000. If the server-side framework doesn't support pagination, implement it yourself. You can use Ajax on the client side for a smoother user experience when switching pages.

Answer 2

Pagination is out of the box with SilverStripe See an example+tutorial here : http://doc.silverstripe.com/framework/en/howto/pagination