Before I go into the example in this little post, let me just say that this situation won’t be applicable to everyone…
But let’s consider the following:
We have a table with tens of thousands of records, that need to be paginated.
As you know, cake will execute two queries; first to get the count of total records, second to get the actual records.
The questions one might ask are:
“Would any user really go through 5 thousand pages to find what they are looking for?”
“If I bring the last 1,000 records wouldn’t that be enough for a vast majority of needs?”
“How many pages in Google do you go through, when searching for something, before you give up?”
“Is it not better to provide filters, or search tools to help your users narrow down the results to something manageable?”
If you’ve answered “Yes” to two or more questions, please consider the hack…
In your model, which needs to be paginated, do the following:
$recursive = 0,
$extra = array()) {
return 1000;
}
Yep, we are overriding paginateCount() and simply returning 1,000 because we know that this will be the maximum amount of records that our paginator needs to know about.
Depending on how complex the underlying query is (for example you might have JOIN’s or various conditions, which would usually need to be taken into the account in your typical count query), the above hack can dramatically increase the performance of your pagination.