I am working on a v8 site with a very large number (50k+) of articles It's been upgraded from a number of previous CMS versions So I'm starting a big refactor

I'm curious about two questions... 1) To be performant - is it still best to use examine to search the articles or is nuCache equally performant to examine? EG find all articles with a certain tag (or a number of tags) in a tag collection document property

I would never have done this with NodeFactory or similar but how does nuCache compare is that what it is designed for- is it more like old fashioned xslt where the effort is in the query rather than inflating that being queried. Is examine for large data sets still necessary.

2) When rendering the results of the query (imagining say 1000 results and I want to show 50 at a time), what's the most performant way to turn these back into strong models? So in the past I might have passed 50 IDs at a time into an object that returned all the summary properties I need to display. If I just get all the properties is that relatively performant or is the default still fine with relatively larger sets of nodes?

Not really important but I'm also curious if people are generally finding 8 faster / better with large sets of articles.