Max amount of rows

bwilli

DataTables utter newbie here. I'm writing a desktop app to archive messages from Mac Messages. The message data is in html format. I probably can load the data via Ajax from the database. But can DataTables show (or pretend to show) 100k records without pagination?

allan

The answer is yes, it can - there are no hard limits anywhere in the software. However, showing 100k rows, regardless of whether you have DataTables or just a plain HTML, is not going to be performant in the browser. That's a lot of DOM elements and the column width calculations the browser performs will take time.

You could consider using Scroller which makes of pagination to create a virtual scroll (full details in its original blog post).

I would urge you to use paging of some sort (Scroller or regular paging) so that the browser isn't forced to draw hundreds of thousands of elements (tr, td and whatever is in your HTML message).

Allan