Published 2026-05-25 by Shubham Bhati — Backend Engineer (Java 17, Spring Boot, Microservices). We've all been there - staring at a slow application, trying to figure out why our database queries are taking so long to execute. In our case, it was a Java-based e-commerce platform built using Spring Boot 3.2 and Spring Data JPA. After digging through the logs, we discovered that the hibernate n+1 problem was the culprit behind the slow performance. This issue occurs when Hibernate executes multiple select queries to fetch related entities, resulting in a significant increase in database load and latency. In this article, we'll explore the causes of the hibernate n+1 problem and discuss various strategies to solve it.…