I'm currently in the middle of a very similar situation. It's fine for dev, but throwing hundreds of queries at a single request just isn't going to scale. We

I'm currently in the middle of a very similar situation. It's fine for dev, but throwing hundreds of queries at a single request just isn't going to scale. We've ended up with stuff like: class Meta(SomeResource.Meta): cls = Challenge select_related_fields = [ 'category', 'owner', 'company', 'bonus', 'reward', ] prefetch_related_fields = [ 'specialities', 'countries', 'companies', 'products', 'groups', ] queryset = (cls.objects .select_related(*select_related_fields) .prefetch_related(*prefetch_related_fields) .all()) which takes some of the pain away, but going through and profiling exactly which prefetches & joins help is a major hassle. Resources with relations with full=True are also brutal. Manually stuffing only the required extra data speeds things up greatly, but there's too much boilerplate for my liking. Having some level in-between 'full' and 'resource-uri only' would be nice, but I haven't seen any nice way to do it.