Terrible performance when deployed to GAE

I'm using a full text search against a table with only 20k records.  On my home MySQL 5.x instance, it takes 12 to 20 ms.  In the cloud SQL console, roughly the same time.   

When I issue the query from GAE, the method call which wrapps the pooled connection takes 1.1 to 1.5 seconds, which eats My GAE cpu hours at an alarming rate. I'm 25% used with only ~80 requests for the day.    Once me site goes live, I'm looking at 4000 to 8000 requests per day.  

What steps do I need to take to get this looked into?  I can provide the query, as well as the isntance name.

Thanks!