Ormexplo

ORM Explosion due to One-For-All (Laravel, CakePHP, Symfony, etc) Framework

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ORM Explosion due to One-For-All (Laravel, CakePHP, Symfony, etc) Framework

It’s 2025 and down through the decades, and technologies, this same awfulness keeps happening … it’s like a fatal flaw of Doing Things The Wrong Way … and an harbinger against relying deeply upon Laravel, CakePHP, Symfony and similar ilk. Get far enough along and the top-down Reason given to keep going is the inertia. Get too far along and the top-down Reason to keep going is the inertia / investment. All such Reasons are bad and lead to same ultimate conclusion of debaclative desolation, doom, demise. That’s right, They All inflict badness pretty quickly on. Don’t get scafooled by your scaffold — One size anything burns equally, eventually.

AI PROMPT

“years ago someone posted about cakephp hitting the mysql 10,000 times per page load. find that or anything similar”

AI RESPONSE

I couldn’t find a post that literally says “CakePHP is hitting MySQL 10,000 times per page load,” but there are a few very close matches and CakePHP-specific threads about massive/N+1 query explosions. Here are the best candidates:

  • Laravel thread with 10,412 queries for one page (very close to the number you remember): “The load of a single page generated 10,412 queries… (you read that right, 10,000 queries to load a single page).” (Stack Overflow)
  • WooCommerce (WordPress) issue documenting 5,000+ DB queries per page on shop/category pages (not CakePHP, but the same class of ORM explosion people run into). (GitHub)

And for CakePHP specifically (same symptom, if not that exact 10k figure):

  • “Why is CakePHP duplicating my queries?” — HABTM/association patterns leading to repeated queries (classic cause of runaway counts). (Stack Overflow)
  • “Too many queries to database” — CakePHP 2.5.5 app under load; discussion focuses on trimming framework-generated hits and app queries. (Cake Software Foundation, Inc.)
  • “How can I minimize the contain queries in CakePHP?” — explains when a single find() + contain joins vs. a query-per-row pattern (the N+1 footgun). (Stack Overflow)
  • Pagination COUNT(*) pain — people hit big extra queries per request because pagination does a count query in addition to the data query. (Stack Overflow)
  • CakePHP docs on eager loading/contain (the antidote to N+1) and pagination limits (to curb query volume). (book.cakephp.org)
  • DebugKit docs — shows where to look to count/inspect queries per request. (book.cakephp.org)

If you want, I can keep digging specifically through older CakePHP blog/forum archives (e.g., 2010–2015 HABTM/Containable threads) to try to surface a post that actually states “10,000 queries,” but the items above capture the same issue and include a concrete 10k example.

ORM Explosion due to One-For-All (Laravel, CakePHP, Symfony, etc) Framework

Here’s what I could actually surface that’s closest to the “CakePHP does ~10,000 queries per page” memory—plus one confirmed 10k example (Laravel) for context.

Closest CakePHP hits (2010–2016 era)

  • “CakePHP Containable is generating far too many queries — into the thousands on one page” (CakePHP 2.4, deep associations). (Stack Overflow)
  • “CakePhp Containable too many queries” — discussion + workaround/plugin; classic Containable/HABTM query explosion. (Stack Overflow)
  • “Why is CakePHP duplicating my queries?” — duplicate queries from HABTM chains; points to Containable/association patterns as the cause. (Stack Overflow)
  • “Maximum SQL queries per page” — CakePHP app; not thousands, but the same theme on per-page query counts. (Stack Overflow)
  • CakePHP forum: “Too many queries to database” — 2.5.5 app collapsing under load (SQL Server backend). (Cake Software Foundation, Inc.)

One verified “~10k queries” post (not Cake, but same ORM footgun)

  • Laravel: “The load of a single page generated 10,412 queries (you read that right, 10,000…).” (Stack Overflow)

Useful docs for diagnosing/avoiding the explosion

  • Containable / eager loading (the antidote to N+1 in old Cake 1.x/2.x). (CakePHP Book)
  • Query builder / eager loading (modern Cake 4/5). (CakePHP Book)
  • DebugKit to see query counts & timings per request. (CakePHP Book)

Takeaway

I couldn’t find a CakePHP post that literally says “10,000 queries,” but there is a CakePHP 2.x thread explicitly reporting “thousands on one page,” and the well-documented Laravel case at ~10k shows the same ORM pattern (deep relations + per-row lazy loads). If you want, I can try specific venues next (old Bakery posts, archived blogspot dev blogs, and the Wayback copy of cakephp-cookbook issues) to hunt for the exact phrasing.

Here’s what I could dig up from the 2010–2015 CakePHP ecosystem (plus one confirmed 10k example for context). I focused on HABTM/Containable/N+1 threads and official venues (Bakery, Cookbook, forum, GitHub).

The closest CakePHP phrasing I can verify

  • Stack Overflow (2015) — a CakePHP 2.4 case explicitly reports “far too many SQL queries — into the thousands on one page.” (Stack Overflow)

Old-school CakePHP threads showing the same failure mode

  • Duplicate/ballooning queries from HABTM chains — classic 2010 thread linking multiple “duplicate queries” cases tied to HABTM + Containable. (Stack Overflow)
  • “Containable too many queries” (2014) — 2.5.x discussion of inefficiency with deep relations. (Stack Overflow)
  • Minimizing Contain queries (2012) — strategies to reduce multi-query explosions. (Stack Overflow)

Official CakePHP touchpoints (useful to prove & diagnose the issue)

  • Bakery (2015): “Queries log for your AJAX requests.” DebugKit 3.1 exposes per-request SQL logs, making the “thousands on one page” measurable rather than anecdotal. (bakery.cakephp.org)
  • Cookbook pages — Containable (2.x) and association docs (HABTM, hasMany) that underlie the N+1 footgun when misused. (CakePHP Book)
  • CakePHP GitHub issue (2015) — deep relationships leading to “too many queries,” prompting custom contain workarounds. (GitHub)

A confirmed “~10k queries” datapoint (not CakePHP, but same ORM pitfall)

  • Laravel (2022) — “The load of a single page generated 10,412 queries (…10,000 queries to load a single page).” (Stack Overflow)

What this establishes

  • There’s a documented CakePHP case of “thousands on one page” (2.x/Containable/HABTM). (Stack Overflow)
  • The exact “10,000” phrasing shows up in the Laravel world (functionally the same N+1/eager-load failure). (Stack Overflow)
  • Official tools/docs (DebugKit, Containable/associations pages) provide the primary sources you’d cite when demonstrating or reproducing the problem in Cake. (bakery.cakephp.org, CakePHP Book)

If you want, I can keep combing older venues specifically for CakePHP (e.g., early Bakery posts, Google Groups archives, and Wayback for retired trackers) to try to find an instance that literally says “10,000 queries” for Cake—so far, the strongest Cake-native line is the 2015 “into the thousands on one page” report.

Got ‘em. Here’s a compact “rogues’ gallery” of real-world ORM blow-ups across Laravel, Symfony/Doctrine, and a few other scaffold-heavy stacks—each with a smoking-gun anecdote or number.

Laravel (Eloquent)

  • 10,412 queries for one page. A Laravel 5.5 app profiled with Clockwork: “the load of a single page generated 10412 queries … 10,000 queries to load a single page.” (Stack Overflow)
  • N+1 is the usual culprit. Laravel News walks through multiple Eloquent N+1 patterns that silently multiply queries. If you see loops that touch relations, assume trouble. (Laravel News)

Symfony / Doctrine

  • “Thousands of queries” from a translation trait. Using KnpLabs DoctrineBehaviors (Translatable) led to a page where Symfony’s debug toolbar reported thousands of queries and ~5 s load time. Classic N+1 through proxied relations. (Stack Overflow)
  • Doctrine N+1 is easy to trigger. SymfonyCasts shows the textbook “1 query + N per row” scenario when loading related data the naive way. (symfonycasts.com)
  • Fix can collapse “hundreds or thousands” to one. Tweaking one-to-many fetching reduced query storms to a single SQL in practice. (Medium)

Other scaffold systems (same footgun)

  • WooCommerce (WordPress):
    – Report of 5000+ DB queries per page on shop/category pages. (GitHub)
    – Another case: 2,268 queries for a category view after an upgrade. (GitHub)
  • Rails (ActiveRecord): It’s “normal for legacy projects to trigger thousands of queries per view” until you hunt N+1s and add eager loading. (pawelurbanek.com)
  • Django ORM: Naive many-to-many traversals can “run thousands of queries” without select_related/prefetch_related. (Stack Overflow)

How teams usually cause these explosions

  • Rendering lists (index pages) that traverse relations inside loops—each access lazily fires its own query (N+1). Eloquent/Doctrine make this effortless… and dangerous. (Laravel News, symfonycasts.com)
  • Helper/behavior layers (e.g., translation proxies, accessors, or computed properties) that read related entities per row. (Stack Overflow)
  • Pagination that does an expensive COUNT(*) plus per-row lazy loads. (Seen across ORMs/frameworks.) (symfonycasts.com)

Quick containment (framework-agnostic)

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