RDS Postgres Peformance
So I came to find out that my heroku instance wasn't in the same availability region as my rds instance.  Once I changed it over to east coast the RDS DB was slightly quicker then my heroku DB.

Incase anyone is stuck on how to create a rds instance in a different region through aws console, you need to click on region (i.e. Oregon) button in the top right corner and then create your instance.