Project EF Core queries before materializing
Use Select to project only the required values before ToListAsync, reducing transferred columns and unnecessary entity materialization on EF Core read paths.
Data-Access
Do not page without deterministic ordering
Give paged database queries a fully unique order so rows with the same sort value cannot move unpredictably between pages.
AsNoTracking belongs on read paths
Skip EF Core change tracking for queries that only read entity data, but keep tracking for load-change-save updates.