The way to answer this question is to examine the whole process. What is the sloweset thing you are doing? A. Accessing your db (v. slow). Storing and retrieving data in memory is quick (unless you use virtual memory). So optimise your data fetch.

Ensure that you only get the data you really need to transfer (i.e. limit the columns and limit the number of records).

Actual performance of an app is not the same as apparent performance. It may be quicker to fetch 9000 records than do twenty fetches of 450 records, but your users won't see it that way. If you can fetch data while the user is processing the first batch, so much the better.

Cheers,

P.