Yii2 and TimescaleDB: GridView very slow on large Table - postgresql

Question

Using Yii2 with TimescaleDB (PostgreSQL Extension for time series data) gets very slow on large tables (> 1 billion rows).
I think that comes from the function getTotalCount()in yii\data\BaseDataProvider which gets called to provide pagination on every page.
We know from TimescaleDB that row counting on large tables gets very slow. If we replace the function getTotalCount() in the model by a "coorrect" solution as
static public function getTotalCount()
{
$connection = Yii::$app->getDb();
$command = $connection->createCommand("
SELECT h.schema_name,
h.table_name,
h.id AS table_id,
h.associated_table_prefix,
row_estimate.row_estimate
FROM _timescaledb_catalog.hypertable h
CROSS JOIN LATERAL ( SELECT sum(cl.reltuples) AS row_estimate
FROM _timescaledb_catalog.chunk c
JOIN pg_class cl ON cl.relname = c.table_name
WHERE c.hypertable_id = h.id and h.table_name = 'value'
GROUP BY h.schema_name, h.table_name) row_estimate
ORDER BY \"schema_name\", \"table_name\";
");
$result = $command->queryAll();
return floatval($result[0]["row_estimate"]);
}
But do we really have to perform this query for pagination?
This seems quite complex. How to optimize this? Maybe just by returning a very large but fixed number since nobody needs pagination over a billion pages?
Example:
const LARGE_NUM = 1000;
static public function getTotalCount()
{
if (Yii::$app->session->get("mytable-rows")>MyClass::LARGE_NUM) {
return MyClass::LARGE_NUM;
}
$totalRows = parent::getTotalCount();
Yii::$app->session->set("mytable-rows",$totalRows);
return $totalRows;
}
Is this a valid and fast solution? Are the dangerous side effects?