Hundred Page Limit

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Hey Erik. I'm a web-dev, so I know my stuff or at least I think I do.

Pagination - is not necessarily painful on the server! I know you guys use PHP. In the following I'm going to assume you're using MySQL as your database.

A common approach on pagination is building a SQL query from PHP like:

$page = 3;
$number_of_posts_per_page = 20;
$thread_id = 123;

$offset = $number_of_posts_per_page * $page;
$sql = "SELECT *
       FROM `posts`
       WHERE `thread_id` = $thread_id
       ORDER BY `id` ASC
       LIMIT $offset, $number_of_posts_per_page"; 

This gives you all the posts on page 3 (with 20 posts per page) that belong to the thread with the id=123. Obviously this will give you at most 20 rows. If the thread has less than 60 posts (less than 3 full pages), say 57 posts then you will get 17 rows.

But, now you'll need another query without the LIMIT clause to determine the actual number of posts there is to build your pagination, so you will do:

  
$sql = "SELECT COUNT(*) FROM `posts`
        WHERE `thread_id` = $thread_id";  

Now you have the actual number of posts the thead contains. Dividing it by $number_of_posts_per_page (20 from above) you get the number of pages the thread has.

However, this last COUNT(*) query is what gives the server pain.

There's an easy remedy for that in MySQL it's called FOUND_ROWS()
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/information-functions.html#function_found-rows

Here's a small exert:

A SELECT statement may include a LIMIT clause to restrict the number of rows the server returns to the client. In some cases, it is desirable to know how many rows the statement would have returned without the LIMIT, but without running the statement again. To obtain this row count, include a SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS option in the SELECT statement, and then invoke FOUND_ROWS() afterward

This means that all you have to do is change the first query to:

 $sql = "SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS *
         FROM `posts`
         WHERE `thread_id` = $thread_id
         ORDER BY `id` ASC
         LIMIT $offset, $number_of_posts_per_page"; 

MySQL will now remember/cache the number of posts the thread has. Without you having to run the above COUNT(*) query again. To get the number of posts you just have to do:

 $sql = "SELECT FOUND_ROWS()"; 

instead. And divide through your number of posts per page to know how many pages there is.

5 years ago !

And still the same problem

Still the same problem!