How to Fix Slow EF Core Queries: Practical Performance Tuning

Practical guide to improving EF Core query performance in .NET applications. Covers 10 techniques: profiling to find real bottlenecks, strategic indexing with Fluent API, projection to DTOs to avoid over-fetching, fixing N+1 queries with eager loading and SplitQuery, server-side filtering and keyset/cursor pagination, compiled and precompiled queries (including EF9 precompiled queries showing 90% speedup), bulk operations with ExecuteUpdateAsync and raw SQL, AsNoTracking for read-only paths, caching with IMemoryCache or Redis, and DbContext pooling. Includes benchmark data and a combined implementation example.