N+1 Queries: The Silent Performance Drain in Django APIs

N+1 queries silently degrade API performance as datasets grow, creating invisible bottlenecks that typically surface only through production monitoring like Sentry. This real-world case study demonstrates how simple Django ORM techniques—select_related and prefetch_related—can reduce database queries from hundreds to just three without restructuring code. For API developers, mastering eager loading patterns is essential to maintaining performance as traffic and data scale.