Why isn't my Query plan parallel?

Schema Design
1

I’m trying to understand how or if I could persuade apollo gateway to leverage parallel execution for this query:

{
  film(id: "1") {
    id
    name
    reviews { text }
  }
}

Here the film(id: "1") query returns a Film by its ID from the films subgraph (which contributes the id and name fields), while the reviews subgraph contributes the reviews field (given a particular Film id)…

The reported query plan is:

QueryPlan {   
  Sequence {  
    Fetch(service: "films") {       
      { film(id: 1) {   __typename  id name   }  }
    },
    Flatten(path: "film") {
      Fetch(service: "reviews") {      
        { ... on Film { __typename id } } =>
        { ... on Film { reviews { text } } }
      }
    }
  }
}

On the one hand, the fact that these 2 Fetches are serial is obvious; the gateway doesn’t know that the result of the first Fetch is essentially already “identified” by dint of the fact that:

  • The query inputs already contain all the information needed for the second Fetch (i.e. the id of the film and the implied __typename, because in the schema Film is a type not an interface)
  • The query returns a single instance of Film, with id matching that requested

But on the other hand, it feels like such an obvious opportunity for parellelism that occurs many times in my experience (i.e. find an instance by its id, then add in a few fields to that instance from other subgraphs).

Am I barking up the wrong tree here? Is this a valid argument, and are there any existing ways or future plans to address this?

2

Hello :wave:
Indeed this could be potentially parallel but at the moment this is not supported by the query planner. This is a one of the potential improvements we might be tackling in the future.

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