Django Admin List View COUNT Queries

Based on the information available, the behavior you're observing is expected in Django's admin interface. When you have filters defined in list_filter, Django performs COUNT queries to display information about the total number of records, even when no filter is actively selected.

Understanding the Behavior

The COUNT queries are used by Django's admin to:

1. Show the total number of records in the changelist
2. Calculate facets (counts for each filter option) introduced in Django 5.0

Solutions

You've already identified one solution:

PYTHONCopied
class MyModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    list_filter = ['field1', 'field2']
    show_full_result_count = False

Setting show_full_result_count = False prevents Django from executing the query to count all objects in the table, which can be beneficial for performance with large datasets.

Alternative Approaches

If you want to see the count only when a filter or search is applied, you might need to create a custom admin view or extend the existing admin templates. Unfortunately, there isn't a built-in setting to conditionally show counts only when filters are applied.

For Django 5.0+, you can also control facets display with:

PYTHONCopied
class MyModelAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    show_facets = False  # Disables the count display next to filter options

ManyToManyField Filters

As a related note, if you're using ManyToManyFields in your list_filter and don't see the filter displayed, this is also expected behavior. Django won't display filters for ManyToManyFields if there are no related objects in the database, as filtering would be meaningless in that case.