Something felt slow Our product backlog list page was sluggish. Not dramatically broken — just… off. The kind of slowness you notice when you switch from a fresh demo tenant to a real one with actual data. So I measured it: 8 items : 206ms TTFB (Time To First Byte) 67 items : 675ms TTFB That's a +469ms difference , or roughly 8ms per item of linear degradation. Every single backlog item added ~8ms to the response time. Not great. The first instinct was to blame the frontend — maybe the component tree was re-rendering too aggressively. But TTFB ruled that out immediately. The browser hadn't even started rendering; the server was taking that long to respond. So the bottleneck was somewhere between the API server and the database. Time to dig deeper. How our preloading works We run Go + gqlgen + GORM on Cloud Run, talking to Cloud SQL (MySQL). The GraphQL layer is designed around a simple principle: The client requests only the fields it needs. The server preloads only what's requested.…