did you try using the native pg library or postgres or pg-promise library and scrap the ORM completely to see what effect it has? If you are looking explicitly for migrations, you can simply use node-pg-migrate https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-pg-migrate and scrap the rest of all the FLUFF that ORMs come with. ORMs in general are horribly bloated and their performance for anything more than select from table where name = $1 is very questionable