ActiveRecord offset pagination performance degradation on large datasets

ActiveRecord utilizes .limit and .offset to bound queries, enabling standard offset-based pagination. However, as the offset value increases, the database must scan and discard all preceding rows, leading to linear performance degradation.

While keyset pagination (seek method) avoids this scan by using indexed columns in a WHERE clause, Ruby on Rails does not provide a built-in native mechanism for keyset pagination, leaving the implementation strategy as a design decision for the developer.

What are the primary trade-offs between offset and keyset pagination regarding API consistency and caching? At what dataset scale does the performance cost of .offset typically necessitate a transition to keyset pagination?