Chris “Woody” Woodruff • 5/31/2026

Pagination in Entity Framework Core: Why Skip/Take Falls Apart on Hot Tables

This article discusses the limitations of offset-based pagination (Skip/Take) in Entity Framework Core for large tables with concurrent writes. It explains performance degradation as offset depth increases and data inconsistency issues on hot tables. The author presents keyset pagination as a scalable alternative, provides code examples, and includes benchmarks against a 1M-row SQL Server table to demonstrate the performance differences.

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#pagination #SQL Server #Entity Framework Core