# ActivityPub developers only please: how many items should be in a full collection page?

@evan@cosocial.ca As an opinion that is likely to be very unpopular… the page size ideally should be set by the client. Only they know their resource makeup and ability to process the returned information.

Otherwise, we tend to run page size between 60 and 100 depending on the content. And if it’s less than 100 entries (and especially when returning an id-list rather than a list of activities), we’ll usually just send them out without paging.

The desire is to balance resource usage to get the highest rate of information transfer, and those are the only levers we have available, and they (currently) aren’t settable by clients, so it seems the best we can do is default to “large chunks”.

I admit that I’m not fond of the page size of 12 that I found in Eugen’s followers list of over half a million entries (some years ago). That’s a lot of network requests and makes their clients work a lot harder than they need to.

@evan@cosocial.ca I don’t support polls on NodeBB yet so can’t vote, but…

Default perPage is 20*. This is configurable in the admin control panel.

* except for user outboxes. That uses a cursor, not pages.

@silverpill@mitra.social – Thanks. Don’t know how I missed that, but I’ll start using it right away. Cheers.

@silverpill@mitra.social @evan@cosocial.ca – Now I see why I missed it. These additional properties aren’t actually defined in the AS spec but only the FEP(?) immediately after implying that the pagination properties were all specified in the AS spec. I get it now, but maybe a wee bit of word-smithing in the FEP could make this a bit clearer.

I guess the question remains how to determine if a site offers cursor-based pagination or recognises ‘maxItems’ per FEP-9f9f. Guess you need to just try it, maybe with an odd number like 19, and see if what you get back is “consistent” with your request, to see if you should continue trying to use client defined pagination for this site. (This might be another good use case for the server ‘capability’ mechanism.)