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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T22:15:09+00:00

I’m trying to optimize a slow query that was generated by the Django ORM.

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I’m trying to optimize a slow query that was generated by the Django ORM. It is a many-to-many query. It takes over 1 min to run.

The tables have a good amount of data, but they aren’t huge (400k rows in sp_article and 300k rows in sp_article_categories)

#categories.article_set.filter(post_count__lte=50)

EXPLAIN ANALYZE SELECT * 
                  FROM "sp_article" 
            INNER JOIN "sp_article_categories" ON ("sp_article"."id" = "sp_article_categories"."article_id") 
                WHERE ("sp_article_categories"."category_id" = 1081  
                  AND "sp_article"."post_count" <= 50 )

Nested Loop  (cost=0.00..6029.01 rows=656 width=741) (actual time=0.472..25.724 rows=1266 loops=1)
  ->  Index Scan using sp_article_categories_category_id on sp_article_categories  (cost=0.00..848.82 rows=656 width=12) (actual time=0.015..1.305 rows=1408 loops=1)
        Index Cond: (category_id = 1081)
  ->  Index Scan using sp_article_pkey on sp_article  (cost=0.00..7.88 rows=1 width=729) (actual time=0.014..0.015 rows=1 loops=1408)
        Index Cond: (sp_article.id = sp_article_categories.article_id)
        Filter: (sp_article.post_count <= 50)
Total runtime: 26.536 ms

I have an index on:

sp_article_categories.article_id (type: btree)
sp_article_categories.category_id
sp_article.post_count (type: btree)

Any suggestions on how I can tune this to get the query speedy?

Thanks!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You’ve provided the vital information here – the explain analyse. That isn’t showing a 1 second runtime though, it’s showing 20 milliseconds. So – either that isn’t the query being run, or the problem is elsewhere.

    The only difference between explain analyse and a real application is that the results aren’t actually returned. You would need a lot of data to slow things down to 1 second though.

    The other suggestions are all off the mark since they’re ignoring the fact that the query isn’t slow. You have the relevant indexes (both sides of the join are using an index scan) and the planner is perfectly capable of filtering on the category table first (that’s the whole point of having a half decent query planner).

    So – you first need to figure out what exactly is slow…

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