$limit (aggregation)

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Definition

$limit: Limits the number of documents passed to the next stage in the pipeline.

Compatibility

You can use $limit for deployments hosted in the following environments:

MongoDB Atlas: The fully managed service for MongoDB deployments in the cloud

MongoDB Enterprise: The subscription-based, self-managed version of MongoDB
MongoDB Community: The source-available, free-to-use, and self-managed version of MongoDB

Syntax

The $limit stage has the following prototype form:

{ $limit: <positive 64-bit integer> }

$limit takes a positive integer that specifies the maximum number of documents to pass along.

Note

Starting in MongoDB 5.0, the $limit pipeline aggregation has a 64-bit integer limit. Values passed to the pipeline which exceed this limit will return a invalid argument error.

Behavior

Using $limit with Sorted Results

If using the $limit stage with any of:

the $sort aggregation stage,
the sort() method, or
the sort field to the findAndModify command or the findAndModify() shell method,

be sure to include at least one field in your sort that contains unique values, before passing results to the $limit stage.

Sorting on fields that contain duplicate values may return an inconsistent sort order for those duplicate fields over multiple executions, especially when the collection is actively receiving writes.

The easiest way to guarantee sort consistency is to include the _id field in your sort query.

See the following for more information on each:

Example

Consider the following example:

db.article.aggregate([
   { $limit : 5 }
]);

This operation returns only the first 5 documents passed to it by the pipeline. $limit has no effect on the content of the documents it passes.

Note

When a $sort precedes a $limit and there are no intervening stages that modify the number of documents, the optimizer can coalesce the $limit into the $sort. This allows the $sort operation to only maintain the top n results as it progresses, where n is the specified limit, and ensures that MongoDB only needs to store n items in memory. This optimization still applies when allowDiskUse is true and the n items exceed the aggregation memory limit.

Tip

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