I'm looking for the most efficient way to get the count of related records from related tables. The best way to understand is to show some code. Here, I'm retrieving a record by id using my repository, along with eager loading related records.

$project = $this->project->findWith($id, ['group', 'expedition.download', 'expedition.subject']);

Relevant relationships:

Project->Expedition = 1:N
Expedition->Subject = 1:N

I only need the number of Subjects in an Expedition so I'm using {{ count($expedition->subject) }} in my view. Right now, I cut down the hits to the database using Cache as a service, but wondered what others do in terms of getting counts from related tables:

public function findWith ($id, $with = array())
{
    $key = md5('project.' . $id . implode(".", $with));

    if ($this->cache->has($key))
    {
        return $this->cache->get($key);
    }

    $project = $this->project->findWith($id, $with);

    $this->cache->put($key, $project);
    
    return $project;
}