I have written my own Restful API and am wondering about the best way to deal with large amounts of records returned from the API. 

For example, if I use `GET` method to `myapi.co.uk/messages/` this will bring back the XML for all message records, which in some cases could be 1000's. This makes using the API very sluggish. 

Can anyone suggest the best way of dealing with this? Is it standard to return results in batches and to specify batch size in the request?