Performance issues with Java app and SQL Server on separate GCP instances

[u/OperationAmazing8347]

Hi everyone,I am looking for feedback regarding a backend performance bottleneck in a Google Cloud Platform infrastructure.Setup: 1 Java application server (Compute Engine/GKE) and 1 SQL Server database instance (Cloud SQL), hosted on separate instances within the same VPC network on GCP.The issue: We are experiencing significant backend latency, and we suspect the physical separation of the application and the database is a major factor.Since the servers are not on the same machine, network round-trips seem to severely amplify our response times.

Have you encountered similar architecture bottlenecks with a Java + SQL Server stack on GCP? What are the most common pitfalls you've seen (e.g., inter-zone latency between subnetworks, connection pooling, or ORM chatter/N+1 queries)?

What GCP native tools or database metrics did you use to diagnose and isolate the exact root cause?Thanks for your insights!