MongoDBhard

Pagination at scale — why can `skip/limit` become slow and what’s a better pattern?

Answer

`skip` must walk past many documents, so deep pages get slower. A better pattern is range/seek pagination (e.g., by `_id` or a createdAt index) using “greater than last seen” with sorting.

db.posts.find({ _id: { $gt: lastId } })
  .sort({ _id: 1 })
  .limit(20)

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