What to do about huge resources in REST API <p>I am bolting a REST interface on to an existing application and I'm curious about what the most appropriate solution is to deal with resources that would return an exorbitant amount of data if they were to be retrieved.</p> <p>The application is an existing timesheet system and one of the resources is a set of a user's "Time Slots". An example URI for these resources is:</p> <pre><code>/users/44/timeslots/ </code></pre> <p>I have read a lot of questions that relate to how to provide the filtering for this resource to retrieve a subset and I already have a solution for that. </p> <p>I want to know how (or if) I should deal with the situation that issuing a GET on the URI above would return megabytes of data from tens or hundreds of thousands of rows and would take a fair amount of server resource to actually respond in the first place. </p> <ul> <li><strong>Is there an HTTP response that is used by convention in these situations?</strong><br> I found HTTP code 413 which relates to a Request entity that is too large, but not one that would be appropriate for when the Response entity would be too large</li> <li><strong>Is there an alternative convention for limiting the response or telling the client that this is a silly request?</strong></li> <li><strong>Should I simply let the server comply with this massive request?</strong></li> </ul> <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> To be clear, I have filtering and splitting of the resource implemented and have considered pagination on other large collection resources. I want to respond appropriately to requests which don't make sense (and have obviously been requested by a client constructing a URI).</p>