Depending on the framework you use in the browser to display the table, you may have too many rows in your table to transmit all at once. If so, you send a subset of the rows to be displayed, along with the data that the front-end JS needs to fetch the next "page" of rows (basically just a starting row ID and an offset).

FWIW you can comfortably avoid paging and preload up to about 10,000 rows in a JSON object that you pass to the browser via your template layer, and DataTables will handle it smoothly (it's pretty nifty and only adds the row into the DOM when the user scrolls it into view).

Hope this helps!