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Django QuerySet Prefetching with Related Fields Causing Performance Issues in Large Datasets

👀 Views: 3 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-03
django optimization queryset performance Python

I'm deploying to production and I'm attempting to set up Hey everyone, I'm running into an issue that's driving me crazy... I'm currently working on a Django application, and I'm facing a performance bottleneck when querying large datasets with related fields. I'm using Django 4.1 and have a model structure that includes a `User` model related to a `Profile` model and a `Post` model. Specifically, I'm trying to fetch all users along with their profiles and the posts they've made. Here’s a snippet of my code: ```python from django.db.models import Prefetch users_with_posts = User.objects.prefetch_related( 'profile', Prefetch('post_set', queryset=Post.objects.all().only('id', 'title')) ) ``` I expected this to optimize my queries, but when I run this in a view that handles about 10,000 users, I notice a significant slow down, with the response time increasing by several seconds. I’ve confirmed that the queries are indeed being executed, but I’m not sure where the bottleneck lies. When I inspect the generated SQL, I see that Django is performing multiple queries rather than a single optimized query. Additionally, I’m receiving the following warning in the console: ``` Warning: QuerySet is using a `Prefetch` object which may lead to N+1 queries if related fields are not properly configured. ``` I’ve tried tweaking the `select_related` method as well, but it doesn’t seem to help with this specific case since the relationships are one-to-many. Does anyone have insights on how to effectively prefetch related fields or manage performance issues with a large dataset in Django? Any suggestions or best practices would be appreciated! I'm working on a mobile app that needs to handle this. This issue appeared after updating to Python 3.9. Is this even possible? I'm working with Python in a Docker container on Windows 11. Has anyone else encountered this? Is there a better approach? Any suggestions would be helpful.