Comparing ADODB with PEAR DB, Metabase and Native MySQL

PEAR DB, ADODB and Metabase are database abstraction libraries. I decided to benchmark some of the most common database abstraction libraries using a simple SELECT statement and measure the overhead compared to using native mysql_* function calls: Benchmark was to select 82 rows from the products table 200 times. The tests were repeated 5 times. Connection times were excluded from the benchmark. Values are in seconds. MySQL 1.12 1.12 1.17 1.15 1.14 ADODB 1.43 1.47 1.47 1.44 1.45 PEAR 3.14 3.13 3.22 3.12 3.16 M'base 4.99 4.72 4.71 4.71 4.72 Average Overhead MySQL 1.14 - ADODB 1.45 27% PEAR 3.15 176% M'base 4.77 318% I was still surprised at how slow some of the libraries were, even though a code inspection had already given strong hints on the expected performance of the class libraries. Methodology Results on Pentium 800 Mhz running Win 2000, PHP 4.0.6 ISAPI on IIS5 with MySQL 3.23, all on the same machine. Source code for these tests is available from http://phplens.com/lens/adodb/