[Answer]-Heroku Django application slower after moving postgres database to Amazon free RDS

If it’s the “free tier” of RDS, you are using a very small database (in terms of CPU and memory) so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it is slow. Specifically, the free tier is a t2.micro, which has one virtual CPU and 1gb of memory.

Also, your storage type (magnetic, ssd, provisioned iops) may make a substantial difference. You can observe the disk stats in cloudwatch for the RDS instance to see if that’s the problem.