How to implement a paginator that doesn't call count(*)

Question

I am working on a django website that has a MySQL innodb backend. We have hundreds of thousands of records in several of our tables and this is causing some site stability/perfo

Answer 1

You can define _count variable in your paginator

  paginator = Paginator(QuerySet, 300)
  paginator._count = 9000 # or use some query here

And here is the part of django paginator code to help you understand what this variable do and how page count works

def _get_count(self):
    "Returns the total number of objects, across all pages."
    if self._count is None:
        try:
            self._count = self.object_list.count()
        except (AttributeError, TypeError):
            # AttributeError if object_list has no count() method.
            # TypeError if object_list.count() requires arguments
            # (i.e. is of type list).
            self._count = len(self.object_list)
    return self._count
count = property(_get_count)

Answer 2

You could also check out django-endless-pagination.endless_pagination.paginator.LazyPaginator is not bad, but you might need to add a few tweaks.