EF Core 10 cold start after idle — is using a hosted service for keep-alive acceptable?

I have an ASP.NET Core 10 application using EF Core 10 with SQL Server 2017.

Problem:

Queries work normally when the app starts.

After the app is idle for a few minutes, all EF Core queries become extremely slow (cold start).

This affects all queries, not a single one.

I have tried:

DbContext pooling (AddDbContextPool)

Query splitting (UseQuerySplittingBehavior(QuerySplittingBehavior.SplitQuery))

Compiled queries and other projection optimizations

None of these consistently resolve the issue.

Current workaround:

I implemented a hosted service that executes a trivial SQL query periodically (every 10 seconds) to keep the connections alive. This prevents the idle cold-start slowdown, but I am aware it may not be considered best practice.

Questions:

Is using a keep-alive hosted service safe and acceptable for production in EF Core 10 / ASP.NET Core 10?

Are there recommended approaches to avoid idle cold-start performance issues without relying on a keep-alive loop?

What techniques are commonly used in production to mitigate cold-start performance problems with EF Core and SQL Server?