Mongo $geoNear not searching in all records - mongodb

Question

I'm wondering if anyone can help me solve a problem with this query.
I'm trying to query all my items with a $geoNear operator but with a very large maxDistance it doesn't seem to search in all records.
The logs show this error "Too many geoNear results for query" which apparently means that the query hit the 16MB limit, but the output is only 20 records and claims the total is 1401 where I would expect 17507 as total.
The average record is 12345 bytes. At 1401 records it stops because it hit 16MB limit.
How can I run this query so that it returns the first 20 results taken from the entire pool of items?
This is the query I'm running:
db.getCollection('items').aggregate([
{
"$geoNear": {
"near": {
"type": "Point",
"coordinates": [
10,
30
]
},
"minDistance": 0,
"maxDistance": 100000,
"spherical": true,
"distanceField": "location",
"limit": 100000
}
},
{
"$sort": {
"createdAt": -1
}
},
{
"$facet": {
"results": [
{
"$skip": 0
},
{
"$limit": 20
}
],
"total": [
{
"$count": "total"
}
]
}
}
])
This is the output of the query (and the error is added to the log):
{
"results" : [
// 20 items
],
"total" : [
{
"total" : 1401
}
]
}

Answer 1

I changed my query to use a separate find() and count() call. The facet was severely slowing down the query and since it really isn't a complex query, there was no reason to use an aggregate.
I initially used the aggregate because it made sense to do 1 db call instead of multiple and with $facet you'd have built in paging with a total count but it 1 aggregate call took 600ms where as now a find() and count() call take 20ms.
The 16MB limit is also no problem anymore.