While Hot Chocolate's UsePaging is amazing ✨, there's one performance flaw: Even if you do not select nodes or edges when querying a Connection type, the resolver for the pagination items is executed. This is unfortunate, since you might want to specifically only query for a totalCount (which might be cheaply resolved), without performing the costly resolution and pagination of nodes.

One idea I had was to create an IOperationOptimizer that traverses the current operation and finds all selection sets on Connections. If the selection set doesn't contain nodes or edges the resolver pipeline of the field returning the Connection will be stubbed out. This way we skip the potentially costly computation of nodes and only evaluate the extensions on the Connection. Since a Connection type itself shouldn't contain any state, we can safely(?) stub out its creation.

An example implementation fo the IOperationOptimizer can be found here

One "downside" is that we now need to add extensions for the totalCount fields ourselves, since [UsePaging(IncludeTotalCount = true)] and the Func for totalCount resolution passed to Connection<T> both depend on the pagination resolver to run. I don't think of this as a loss though, since I'm not particularly fond of those approaches and would rather have a dedicated field responsible for the computation of the totalCount 😝