I forked a version of Kaminari a few months ago to solve this problem for me that I just updated with the latest upstream: https://github.com/joshcutler/kaminari

I added a class method for Mongoid::Documents called limit_max_count_results_to that limits the size of Kaminari's total_count

By the way, if you do .limit() / .offset() pagination, by the time you get into really high offsets, queries will start going slow again. Mongo has to do a scan up to the document at offset that you are asking for.

it does, if you change your pagination interface to only care if there are more results after this page...