!CHAPTER Counting

!SECTION Amount of documents in a collection

To return the count of documents that currently exist in a collection,
you can call the [LENGTH() function](../Aql/ArrayFunctions.md#length):

```
RETURN LENGTH(collection)
```

This type of call is optimized since 2.8 (no unnecessary intermediate result
is built up in memory) and it is therefore the prefered way to determine the count.
In earlier versions with `COLLECT ... WITH COUNT INTO` available (since 2.4),
you may use the following code for better performance instead:

```
FOR doc IN collection
COLLECT WITH COUNT INTO length
RETURN length
```