Hello @Jason_Tran , hope you are doing fine!
Forgive me for not providing the necessary specifics. The processing times actually come from Postman, so they are somewhat “dirty” as it is not just pure database queries. Today I launched the paid M10 instance and I am facing what seems to be a similar problem as with the free instance, albeit somewhat milder.
The following is the Postman report for creating a resource on AWS M10. The server is based in a city where I am located and where I am firing the requests from.

That very same request done to MongoDB hosted locally:

I just can’t seem to understand what is causing such an increase. By the way, I have found the following forum post regarding the similar issue:
The response there mentions the reopening of connections being the potential suspect, but I am not sure if this is my case, as I am using mongoose and performing connect() only once (during the start up of the app).