Why does MYSQL higher LIMIT offset slow the query down?

Question

Scenario in short: A table with more than 16 million records [2GB in size]. The higher LIMIT offset with SELECT, the slower the query becomes, when using ORDER BY *prima

Answer 1

I had the exact same problem myself. Given the fact that you want to collect a large amount of this data and not a specific set of 30 you'll be probably running a loop and incrementing the offset by 30.

So what you can do instead is:

1. Hold the last id of a set of data(30) (e.g. lastId = 530)
2. Add the condition WHERE id > lastId limit 0,30

So you can always have a ZERO offset. You will be amazed by the performance improvement.