I have an app that usually runs against a local mssql Express database, on the same physical machine. The client wants to meove the database into the data center instead, so as a TEST only, I fired up a Amazon AWS t2Medium instance and installed SQL express on it, once I opened up enough ports on their firewall, i could connect my app and log in.

Oh My Blessed Aunt Mabel, this thing is REALLY REALLY REALLY slow. I was hoping that a ping time of 90ms would be fast enough, but it's not. Is there anything I can do, say forcing the connection to stay 'live' between calls or something?

I'm going to do some discrete timing, just to see what might be a thing.