With virtual replicas, it is expected that the sorted results are not exhaustive. The same amount of results is shown when applying a facet filter, but it is a different set of records than without the facet filter.
When you use a filter, the results are displayed based on the following sequence:
- filters the master index
- retrieves the first x number of records based on the paginationLimitedTo parameter value
- sorts those results based on the virtual replica configuration.
The paginationLimitedTo value is set to 1000 by default and can be increased up to 20,000. With this default value, the virtual replica retrieves the top 1000 items from the primary index and returns them with the specified sorting. Because the initial fetch from the primary index is based on the default relevancy configuration, it's possible that some items are not retrieved in this phase.
Increasing the paginationLimitedTo value to 20,000 allows virtual replicas to retrieve more items, but it can also increase the latency. The relevancy strictness parameter controls the threshold when fetching records from the primary index, but the paginationLimitedTo parameter still limits the result.
If you need an exhaustive sort with an index that contains more than 20,000 records, please consider using standard replicas instead.