pagination with 500000 items

rubyonrails-talk
1

hi

I've got a pagination with about 500000 items, and I don't know if it will be slow. I need only the first 1000, so what I'm trying to do is @item_pages, @items = paginate(:products, :order => "title", :per_page => 15, :limit => 1000)

But paginate seems to have no limit option. Will the pagination be fast without this option?

Luma

2

In reality no user of your application will page through 500,000 items.

If you only need the first 1,000 items, why not limit the results to 1,000 and paginate those in viewable chunks?

You can use a combination of tagging and searching to help users get the "right" 1,000 records to look through.

3

I've got a pagination with about 500000 items, and I don't know if it will be slow. I need only the first 1000, so what I'm trying to do is @item_pages, @items = paginate(:products, :order => "title", :per_page => 15, :limit => 1000)

The built in rails pagination will explode with that many items. I strongly recomment find_by_sql with a :limit parameter.

I recently used some the info here: http://www.igvita.com/blog/2006/09/22/eager-find-by-sql-pagination-in-rails/ along with the paginating_find plugin from here:

Workign well with 100s of 1000s or records

4

Just use will_paginate and not look back.

5

I second that.. The Paginator in rails has an issue with getting all the records for you.. We use paginating_find plugin here...works good so far.

cheers...

6

The built-in paginator is a known performance and scalability bottleneck and is likely to be removed from the Rails core in upcoming releases. Luckily, there's a couple of very good plugins out there that've tackled the issue: paginating_find [1] and will_paginate [2].

It's gone in edge rails, though there's a plugin for backwards compatibility purposes.

7

Watch this #51 will_paginate - RailsCasts

Will explains things for you

8

thanks for that many answers. I'll try the plugins.

9

Hi,

thanks all for the pagination tips, and thanks too for pointing out the RailsCasts. For some reason I had not picked up on these yet, but have just been and had a look and they are really cool.

Tonypm