Why is a Mysql query execution in Node JS so much slower than a direct Mysql query execution?

Query: select id, event_time from events where event_time > 1395797406712 and event_time < 1398389406712 order by event_time asc.

this query returns ~25k rows (500KB in total size).

When I query the above query in Node.js using the node-mysql driver, it takes ~3-4 seconds to execute. (I used console.time and console.timeEnd)

When I query it directly in mySql, it says it takes ~200 ms.

What accounts for this immense difference, and how do I improve the Node.js implementation to be inline with the direct Mysql query?

Turns out it was an Amazon backend problem. We're using Elastic Beanstalk, and the EC2 and RDS instance are in the same region but not in the same availability zone. Once I set them to be the same, i.e., us-east-1a, the query in node.js took around ~200ms.