Execution cost spikes

Queries that are valid and small can still trigger expensive execution, such as large fan-out, expensive joins, or heavy computation.

Symptoms

• Slow requests despite small payloads
• Resource exhaustion during execution
• High variance in latency for similar queries

Why it matters

Without predictable execution costs, default limits and SLOs become guesswork.

Practices that address this

• Pagination limits

Patterns that address this

• Validation pagination limits
• Resolver pagination limits
• Query complexity limits
• Depth limits