--- title: Return Value Optimization for AQL - ArangoDB description: While in search for further AQL query optimizations last week, we found that intermediate AQL query results were copied one time too often in some cases. Precisely, the data that a query’s ReturnNode will return to the caller was copied into the ReturnNode’s own register. With ReturnNode’s never modifying their input data, this demanded for… --- ArangoDB 3.12 Product Release Announcement! Read the blog for details. 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Precisely, the data that a query’s `ReturnNode` will return to the caller was copied into the `ReturnNode`’s own register. With `ReturnNode`’s never modifying their input data, this demanded for something that is called return-value optimization in compilers. 2.6 will now optimize away these copies in many cases, and my blog post [Return Value Optimization for AQL](https://jsteemann.github.io/blog/2015/05/04/return-value-optimization-for-aql/) shows performance benefits of 10-25% that can be expected due to the optimization. [Twitter](https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?url=https://blog.arangodb.com/blog/2015/05/return-value-optimization-for-aql) [LinkedIn](http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://blog.arangodb.com/blog/2015/05/return-value-optimization-for-aql) [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/share?url=https://blog.arangodb.com/blog/2015/05/return-value-optimization-for-aql) [Yahoo](https://plus.google.com/share?url=https://blog.arangodb.com/blog/2015/05/return-value-optimization-for-aql%3Futm_medium%3Dsocial%26utm_source%3Dgoogle_plus) ![Picture of Jan Steemann](https://blog.arangodb.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/Authors/Jan-Steemann-100x100.webp) May 04, 2015 , [Jan Steemann](https://blog.arangodb.com/blog/author/jan-steemann) After more than 30 years of playing around with 8 bit computers, assembler and scripting languages, Jan decided to move on to work in database engineering. Jan is now a senior C/C++ developer with the ArangoDB core team, being there from version 0.1. He is mostly working on performance optimization, storage engines and the querying functionality. 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