Question

I ran some simple tests: same complex query in mysql and php and measured the times taken to process them. The results are very controversial and suggest that some queries PHP processes faster than MySql.

In theory, shouldn’t be the MySql faster?
I am want compare how PHP (scripting language) interface decreases the performance of complex SQL query. But why my results suggest otherwise?

Those are averages, I run each query 3 times!

php code:

<?php
$con = mysql_connect("localhost","root","");
if (!$con)
  {
  die('Could not connect: ' . mysql_error());
  }

mysql_select_db("test3", $con);

    $start = microtime(TRUE);
    $result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM `test`
    ORDER BY `test`.`test1` DESC
    LIMIT 0,100");


echo "<table border='1'>
<tr>
<th>ID</th>
<th>test1</th>
<th>test2</th>
<th>test3</th>
<th>test4</th>
</tr>";

while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
  {
  echo "<tr>";
  echo "<td>" . $row['ID'] . "</td>";
  echo "<td>" . $row['Test1'] . "</td>";
  echo "<td>" . $row['Test2'] . "</td>";
  echo "<td>" . $row['Test3'] . "</td>";
  echo "<td>" . $row['Test4'] . "</td>";
  echo "</tr>";
  }
echo "</table>";

$end = microtime(TRUE);

$sqlTime = $end - $start;


mysql_close($con);
echo $sqlTime
?> 

The results: time in seconds against the number of records:

Answer 1

I can see you are using phpmyadmin, it is scripted too to return the values.This might be slow than the speed of your script which is definitely small. Did you consider to run the mysql queries from the command prompt?This might give you a clear difference.