More efficient to have one query loadng a lot of data, or multiple queries loading smaller chunks?

I'm planning on building a page with multiple "tabs" (up to 4) within it, and up to 25 "rows" per tab. Would it be more efficient to load all (up to) 4 tabs worth of data at once, or would it be better to load the first tabs data, then if the second is clicked to ajax in that set? Or would it re开发者_如何学运维ally just depend on the query?

Thanks

---

It depends on the query.

Google paginates search results because a single query might bring back millions of hits, ranked by likelihood of usefulness.

If the queries are small, the answer doesn't matter much. The only thing users might notice is network latency.