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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T05:48:59+00:00

I currently have a listing of data that has a randomly generated order listing.

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I currently have a listing of data that has a randomly generated order listing. Right now there is no pagination, so it is easy for me to generate a randomly ordered list. As my list of data grows, it gets slower because of all the data, so the obvious solution is pagination. The issue that I have with pagination is that I cannot randomly generate the order every time the page loads, so my manager and I have come to the conclusion that a list will have to be pre-generated ahead of time and will be re-generated every x amount of time. Now the issue is how do we store this generated list? There are four options that we’ve come up with:

  1. Session (takes up ram on the server)
  2. Cookies (more data is transmitted. Think about thousands of integer values transmitted to the user)
  3. Flat File (Implementation might take a bit of time. Not an extreme amount, but a little longer than the rest)
  4. database (a cron job will run ever x amount of time and do a mass update on all records. Our worry is that if there is too much data, it might slow down the system if people are hitting the server during an update.)

If there are any other solutions which seem better than pre-generated time-based lists, I’d love to hear about them.

Thanks.

UPDATE: An answer that I really liked, but was deleted for some reason, was that someone mentioned the use of a SEED, then I can store the seed instead of a list of ids, which would cut-down my data storage and simplify everything. I just tested the solution, and it works almost flawlessly. The only problem is that when I use LIMIT, everything will screw up. Does anyone have an suggestions to that? I don’t want to have to generate all the data every time, I just want to use LIMIT * , . If I use this with a seed though, the numbers always reset, as it should.

Hopefully that made sense. It made more sense as I was thinking about it than how it turned out typed.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Mysql RAND() accepts a seed as an optional argument. Using a seed, it will return the same randomized result set each time.

    What you could do is generate a random seed in PHP on the first page request and pass it along to each page using a query string.

    Edit: Sorry, I didn’t realize the solution was posted already but was deleted.

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