[julian37]

try dropping the ORM (or find another one)

Dropping or replacing the ORM is a big undertaking in anything but small toy projects.

Better advice is to run a profiler and crank up the ORM's verbosity in order to determine the extent of overhead imposed by the ORM, and something like pg_stat_statement and EXPLAIN ANALYZE (in the case of Postgres) to find slow statements and see why they are slow. This will give you a much better idea of where time is spent, to what extent things can be optimized, and whether the ORM is to blame for any performance issues.