Strapi and MySQL Performance Issue After Upgrading to Pro Plan

Hello Railway team,

I recently upgraded from the Hobby plan to Pro specifically to set up the same regions for my Strapi CMS and MySQL database (EU West). On the Hobby plan, there wasn't an option to change the DB region to EU West, which I believed was causing performance issues.

I expected that my Strapi REST API (which I use in my Next.js application) would work much faster after this change. However, I've observed some unexpected results:

What I'm Seeing

1. Local Strapi + Remote DB: When I run Strapi locally and connect to the remote DB hosted on EU West, API calls are extremely fast (~50-150ms) for retrieving 5 articles.

2. Deployed Strapi + Remote DB: When I use the deployed Strapi URL with the remote DB on EU West region, API calls are still slow (~1.2-1.3 seconds) for the same operation.

Before the region change, a simple request to get 5 articles took around 1.5-2 seconds, so there's been minimal improvement despite both services now being in the same region.

Important Details

• I use Public Networking to connect to the DB

My Analysis

This performance difference makes me think that the Strapi instance itself is the bottleneck, not the database, since requests are very fast when Strapi runs locally but connected to the same remote DB.

Any suggestions on how to improve or troubleshoot this scenario would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your help!