Query Optimization for J6

[prneo]

Hi Joomla Community,

There is a very unoptimized query for loading contents specially in paginated lists that use CASE in ORDER BY and also use LIMIT. On a large website and also as today lots of AI crawlers fetch website with tons of requests, It will easily cause high server load due to 3-4 secs that this query needs to be executed! Please resolve it in J6.

One example:

SELECT a.id, a.title, a.alias, a.introtext, a.fulltext, a.checked_out, a.checked_out_time, a.catid, a.created, a.created_by, a.created_by_alias, CASE WHEN c.published = 2 AND a.state > 0 THEN 2 WHEN c.published != 1 THEN 0 ELSE a.state END as state,CASE WHEN a.modified = '0000-00-00 00:00:00' THEN a.created ELSE a.modified END as modified, a.modified_by, uam.name as modified_by_name,CASE WHEN a.publish_up = '0000-00-00 00:00:00' THEN a.created ELSE a.publish_up END as publish_up,a.publish_down, a.images, a.urls, a.attribs, a.metadata, a.metakey, a.metadesc, a.access, a.hits, a.xreference, a.featured, a.language, LENGTH(a.fulltext) AS readmore, a.ordering,c.title AS category_title, c.path AS category_route, c.access AS category_access, c.alias AS category_alias,c.published, c.published AS parents_published, c.lft,CASE WHEN a.created_by_alias > ' ' THEN a.created_by_alias ELSE ua.name END AS author,ua.email AS author_email,parent.title as parent_title, parent.id as parent_id, parent.path as parent_route, parent.alias as parent_alias,COALESCE(NULLIF(ROUND(v.rating_sum / v.rating_count, 0), 0), 0) AS rating,
COALESCE(NULLIF(v.rating_count, 0), 0) as rating_count
FROM X_content AS a
LEFT JOIN X_categories AS c ON c.id = a.catid
LEFT JOIN X_users AS ua ON ua.id = a.created_by
LEFT JOIN X_users AS uam ON uam.id = a.modified_by
LEFT JOIN X_categories as parent ON parent.id = c.parent_id
LEFT JOIN X_content_rating AS v ON a.id = v.content_id
WHERE a.featured = 1 AND a.access IN (1,1,4) AND c.access IN (1,1,4) AND c.published = 1 AND a.state = 1 AND (a.publish_up = '0000-00-00 00:00:00' OR a.publish_up <= '2025-08-05 09:17:45') AND (a.publish_down = '0000-00-00 00:00:00' OR a.publish_down >= '2025-08-05 09:17:45')
ORDER BY CASE WHEN a.publish_up = '0000-00-00 00:00:00' THEN a.created ELSE a.publish_up END DESC , a.created DESC LIMIT 54270, 10