I turned pagination on in Django Rest framework and it appears to be incredibly slow. Count looks like the culprit, and is taking hundreds of milliseconds to return each time due to the millions of rows in the tables.

I am using postgresql as the database. Is there any way to not count the rows and still use pagination? The performance was fine before this was enabled if I manually filtered the queryset.

Override the get_paginated_response method of your pagination class, and do not include the count. You can refer to the base implementation of the PageNumberPagination class to see what you should return.

from rest_framework.pagination import PageNumberPagination
from collections import OrderedDict # requires Python 2.7 or later

class PageNumberPaginationWithoutCount(PageNumberPagination):
    # Set any other options you want here like page_size

    def get_paginated_response(self, data):
        return Response(OrderedDict([
            ('next', self.get_next_link()),
            ('previous', self.get_previous_link()),
            ('results', data)
        ]))

Then in your settings.py, set DEFAULT_PAGINATION_CLASS to your new pagination class.

DEFAULT_PAGINATION_CLASS = 'path.to.PageNumberPaginationWithoutCount'

This approach is used in the example in the pagination docs.

Edit: from the comments below it sounds like this might not be enough to prevent the slow sql query, so you might need to override paginate_queryset as well.