The N+1 query problem is the most common performance issue in Laravel applications, and it's the easiest to introduce accidentally. A developer adds $post->author->name in a Blade template, and suddenly a page that loaded 10 posts now executes 11 database queries instead of 2. Scale that to 100 posts and you have 101 queries. Scale to a thousand and your database server is on fire. What makes N+1 problems particularly insidious is that they're invisible during development. Your local database with 20 records responds instantly whether you execute 1 query or 100. The problem only becomes apparent in production where tables have millions of rows, query latency is higher, and database connections are shared across hundreds of concurrent requests. This post covers everything you need to detect N+1 queries, prevent them from being introduced, and monitor for them in production Laravel applications.…