The text explores the performance and impact of using Amazon RDS Proxy in handling database connections within serverless architectures, highlighting its significance in managing connections efficiently to prevent overloading database resources. Through various benchmarks, the author identifies that RDS Proxy adds slight overhead to each request but significantly reduces the database's load by pooling and sharing connections, thus enhancing scalability and efficiency. The investigation is driven by a discrepancy observed in database query times compared to API queries, revealing that Lambda functions opening new connections for each query contribute to the delay. The text also addresses challenges encountered while setting up RDS Proxy, such as its compatibility with specific database engine versions and the necessity of operating within the same VPC, and discusses its performance in different scenarios, including cross-region benchmarks and Lambda functions integrated with RDS Proxy versus direct RDS access.