10 Common EF Core Mistakes That Quietly Kill .NET API Performance in Production

A field guide published on DEV Community identifies 10 Entity Framework Core anti-patterns that frequently degrade .NET API performance in production environments. The issues include N+1 queries, missing AsNoTracking on read paths, loading full entities instead of projections, absent pagination, and client-side evaluation, among others. While these patterns often pass development tests without issue, they compound under real data volumes to cause high latency and unnecessary database scaling. The guide recommends instrumenting queries first before changing code, using tools like EF Core's built-in logging to detect problematic SQL patterns early. Additional operational caveats cover ExecuteUpdate and ExecuteDelete usage, and the guide closes with a troubleshooting checklist and notes on improvements introduced in EF Core 10.