Can sorting be done on the server?

I have a grid v1 in use that displays a very large set of data (around 2.5k items), and the sorting procedure takes a bit longer than I'm comfortable with. I sped up the process a by a few seconds by overwriting the sort function to use a set of presorted data arrays, but it still leaves much to be desired.

My question was if I could get it to do the sorting on the server somehow, or if there was some other way to significantly speed things up? Thanks to anyone who answers. =)

Mike

Nevermind, I found some older posts that seem to have what I'm looking for.