How do I improve the performance of counting number of relationships on a node?

Using Cypher, one could count the number of relationships in the following manner

Which will report the number of incoming/outgoing relationships for the Actor named Sylvester Stallone.

Using bin/neo4j-shell and running a profile on the query will produce the following output:

The Cypher can be rewritten as

And to which the profile is:

From the profile above, you will see a reference to GetDegree(n,None,BOTH) which occurs as a result of the usage of size( (n)-[]-()); .

Because of this, we do not actually perform a traversal of relationships from (n) but rather consult the degree value stored with the given node.

In the above GetDegree() expression, the 2nd parameter refers to the relationship name, and the 3rd parameter refers to the direction of the relationship.

For example, the Cypher of

would result in the following profile:

and thus a GetDegree(n,Some(ACTED_IN),BOTH).