How can you optimize Apollo Gateway performance?

Performance work on a federated gateway spans both infrastructure choices and schema design.

• Migrate to Apollo Router for the biggest single win — its Rust runtime handles substantially more throughput at lower latency than the Node.js Gateway.
• Use @provides where a subgraph can cheaply supply a related entity's fields, avoiding an extra network hop.
• Enable Automatic Persisted Queries (APQ) to shrink repeat request payloads to just a hash.
• Rely on query plan caching — both Gateway and Router cache plans for identical operation shapes by default.
• Avoid deeply chained @requires relationships that force long sequential fetch chains.
• Colocate the gateway and subgraphs in the same region or VPC to cut network round-trip time.
• Batch data loading inside each subgraph with a DataLoader-style pattern — federation doesn't remove ordinary N+1 concerns within a single service.

In practice, most gateways hitting real performance ceilings get more from the Router migration alone than from any schema-level tuning.