MySQL or MySQLi or PDO
Lessons learned: MySQLi is 3-4 times slower than MySQL when fetching less then 500 datasets MySQLi is 2-4 times faster than MySQL when fetching more than 500 datasets PDO is 2-5 times slower than MySQL/MySQLi Unbuffered queries are 15-40 percent faster than buffered queries in MySQLi Unbuffered queries are 10-25 percent faster than buffered queries in MySQL for less than 10000 datasets Unbuffered queries are 3-7 percent slower than buffered queries in MySQL for more than 10000 datasets Unbuffered queries are 0-5 percent faster than buffered queries in PDO Non thread safe versions of PHP on win32 are 50 percent faster than thread safe versions Here is the test script: $table = 'test1.test2'; benchmark($table, 100); benchmark($table, 500); benchmark($table, 1000); benchmark($table, 5000); benchmark($table, 10000); benchmark($table, 50000); benchmark($table, 100000); function benchmark($table, $size) { mysql_connect('127.0.0.1', 'root', ''); mysql_qu...