The Django Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) is incredibly powerful, but it's easy to accidentally write inefficient queries that slow down your application as your database grows.
One of the most common pitfalls is the 'N+1 query problem'. This happens when you retrieve a list of objects and then loop through them to access a related object. The ORM will execute one query to get the list, and then N additional queries for each related object.
Optimizing with select_related and prefetch_related
To solve the N+1 problem, Django provides `select_related` and `prefetch_related`.
Mastering these two methods will solve 90% of your performance bottlenecks in Django.
