Can I improve performance of my GCE small instance?

I'm using cloud VPS instances to host very small private game servers. On Amazon EC2, I get good performance on their micro instance (1 vCPU [single hyperthread on a 2.5GHz Intel Xeon], 1GB memory).

I want to use Google Compute Engine though, because I'm more comfortable with their UX and billing. However, on their small instance (1 vCPU [single hyperthread on a 2.6GHz Intel Xeon], 1.7GB memory).

The issue is that even when I configure near-identical instances with the same game using the same settings, the AWS EC2 instances perform much better than the GCE ones. To give you an idea, while the game isn't Minecraft I'll use that as an example. On the AWS EC2 instances, succeeding world chunks would load perfectly fine as players approach the edge of a chunk. On the GCE instances, even on more powerful machine types, chunks fail to load after players travel a certain distance; and they must disconnect from and re-login to the server to continue playing.

I can provide more information if necessary, but I'm not sure what is relevant. Any advice would be appreciated.