[kevin1024]

You can combine limit() with count by passing true to the count function. So if you only care about counts greater than, say, 10000, you can do db.collection.find({criteria:'123}).limit(10000).count(true) and you will only get back a max of 10000. This puts an upper bound on waiting for some large counts to come back.

[cheald]

That's awfully handy. It unfortunately doesn't solve the pagination problem, though. :/

[josh_cutler]

I forked a version of Kaminari a few months ago to solve this problem for me that I just updated with the latest upstream: https://github.com/joshcutler/kaminari

I added a class method for Mongoid::Documents called limit_max_count_results_to that limits the size of Kaminari's total_count

[kevin1024]

By the way, if you do .limit() / .offset() pagination, by the time you get into really high offsets, queries will start going slow again. Mongo has to do a scan up to the document at offset that you are asking for.

[taf2]

it does, if you change your pagination interface to only care if there are more results after this page...

[cheald]

If your pagination interface is simply "Next", then why not skip the count all together, limit(N+1) documents, and offer the "Next" button if the result set is N+1 large?