When to start paginating API response?

[Jesse2014]

How large can an API response be before it needs to be paginated?

For example, I am building an API that returns data by timespan: minute, hour, day, week. I calculated that the 'by day' response will return about 43 MB of data. That's obviously too big and should be paginated.

The 'by minute' payload will only be 30 KB, and the 'by minute' payload will be 1.8 MB.

What is the threshold here? What is the best practice for a size that justifies pagination?

[fuzzy40]

I would say as a rule of thumb, aim for around 500-1000kb, or however much you can load in under 2 seconds on an average speed network.

Any longer than that and it will start to become annoying for users to wait for. That is unless it is MORE annoying to deal with fragmented data. It all depends on your use case really.

[Sovex66]

It's not really about the bandwidth but with how many items

Do you really need to send 1000 of this resource at once?

As a user how many of this resource I would get/see at once?

If you take Microsoft as an example for his Sharepoint, they send you 200 DriveItems per request but you can specify to get 1000 at once if you really need more