Pagination: Server Side or Client Side?

The right answer depends on your priorities and the size of the data set to be paginated.

Server side pagination is best for:

• Large data set
• Faster initial page load
• Accessibility for those not running javascript

Client side pagination is best for:

• Small data set
• Faster subsequent page loads

So if you're paginating for primarily cosmetic reasons, it makes more sense to handle it client side. And if you're paginating to reduce initial load time, server side is the obvious choice.

Of course, client side's advantage on subsequent page load times diminishes if you utilize Ajax to load subsequent pages.

Doing it on client side will make your user download all the data at first which might not be needed, and will remove the primary benefit of pagination.

The best way to do so for such kind of AJAX apps is to make AJAX call the server for next page and add update the current page using client side script.

If you have large pages and a large number of pages you are better of requesting pages in chunks from the server via AJAX. So let the server do the pagination, based of your request URL.

You can also pre-fetch the next few pages the user will likely view to make the interface seem more responsive.

If there are only few pages, grabbing it all up-front and paginating on the client may be a better choice.