@Blommetje I'd suggest you use Pagination instead of Max no. of records in the Universal GUI. I believe this will resolve your particular example and it's also a more User-friendly solution. Would that work for you? See Settings for Subjects | Thinkwise Documentation for some more background info on the options and differences.

I currently have pagination on my tables. However, this still ‘loads’ (not sure if actually/actively loaded - or only page numbers are displayed and data is fetched when page is selected..) a whole lot of rows. 

My client has an accounts table, with roughly 35k of accounts. This results in (opening with a default prefilter active) ; 

a rather unusable situation. No one needs 22k of rows or 600+ pages. 
I’d rather see (and assuming this will increase performance, and not load 22k rows) 100rows and 3 pages. 

@Blommetje We only load the data for the active Page (so a top 100 statement). And we do a COUNT query to determine the total number of records, which is then used to determine the total number of Pages to be displayed.

Agreed that usually a user wouldn't need to see so many records. You could consider options like a more stringent Pre-filter, or ‘Start empty with filter’. But from a performance and findability perspective you currently have the recommended setup.

The Count query is done ‘lazy’, so shouldn't affect the loading of the first page with data. And it should be a very inexpensive query in terms of performance and speed. You can check the different query timings in the Network tab.

For more background information, see also this conversation: 

Hi @Blommetje, did Arie's reaction help you or do you have any follow-up questions on this topic?