That's really a matter of personal taste. You can do the "limiting" in either place. I weigh the decision on this type of thing based on the server resources used. If the cost of retrieving the data is high and likely to be large often, then I would put it into the controller. That way you can limit it as early as possible, for example if you know you want to page rows from the database 50 at a time, it's best to just make the SQL 'LIMIT 50'.
If the chance that the data is too large are small ( not frequent ) and the cost to retrieve it isn't large, then I would probably opt to limit it in the template. So as not to overly limit the flexibility of the application.
