Appsync - DynamoDB from Amplify very slow response times

Hi, we have a appsync setup with dynamodb which was setup using Amplify GRAPHQL API over a year ago.

It's in the us-east-1 region and I access the endpoints from the Philippines (Southeast Asia). We've always had fairly slow response times (around 1sec or more) ever since but I thought it was pretty normal.

We're trying to now optimize our app and I read that normal response times should never exceed 500ms.

Can someone help us here? Maybe take a look at how we setup our code and speed queries up

Thank you very much.