Database

I once inherited a dashboard page that took over five seconds to load. The API endpoint behind it looked innocent enough, but digging in, I found a classic case of death by a thousand cuts: lazy loading, bloated entities, and chatty database calls. It was a textbook example of default EF Core behavior backfiring under real-world load.

After fixing that mess (and many others like it), I’ve developed a small playbook of go-to optimizations. These aren’t wild, complex tricks. They’re five fundamental patterns that I apply to almost every high-traffic ASP.NET Core project.

Here’s what I do to keep my data layers fast and lean.

1. Ditch Full Entities, Project to DTOs

This one is my golden rule for read queries. If you’re just displaying data, stop loading full-blown EF Core entities.

The problem is that when you pull an entity, EF Core has to hydrate every single property. Even the ones you don’t need. This results in bigger SQL queries that join more tables and pull back way more data than your API client will ever see.

It’s pure waste.

Instead, use Select to project directly into a Data Transfer Object (DTO).

// The slow way
var users = await _context.Users
    .Include(u => u.Profile) // Pulls everything from two tables
    .ToListAsync();

// The fast, clean way
var users = await _context.Users
    .Select(u => new UserSummaryDto 
    {
        Id = u.Id,
        Name = u.Name,
        Email = u.Email
    })
    .ToListAsync();

On a …