Javadoc
The skip option should only be used with small values, as skipping a large range of documents this way is inefficient (it scans the index from the startkey and then skips N elements, but still needs to read all the index values to do that). For efficient paging you'll need to use startkey and limit. If you expect to have multiple documents emit identical keys, you'll need to use startkey_docid in addition to startkey to paginate correctly. The reason is that startkey alone will no longer be sufficient to uniquely identify a row.