Home/ Questions/Q 6951661
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-27T14:14:53+00:00

I have been using mostly .values() to speed up my django queries. Recently I

  • 0

I have been using mostly .values() to speed up my django queries.

Recently I tried to use the .only() which I assumed is only slightly slower than values with the added benefit of not having to deal with dictionaries (e.g. key typos, no code auto-complete)

But it seems that in loading 1000 objects, .only() came up ~.5-1 second slower than if I were to use .values() (which takes about 4s).

Have any of you experienced similar performance, and can anyone confirm or repudiate this observation?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Although the query itself would probably take a similar amount of time to complete, I suspect the performance difference you’re seeing is on the Python side. When you use the ‘only’ method, you still get full Django objects back from the database. These are expensive to set up and take a lot more memory. They actually become almost completely unmanageable when dealing with more than a few thousand items.

    The ‘values’ method, as you know, puts everything into a standard Python dictionary. These are much harder to work with, but the setup time is trivial and the memory usage is dramatically less.

    If you want to check out the actual query length difference, check out the django debug toolbar. It’ll give you a handy profiled list of every query made for a page load.

    • 0