MySql localhost vs Amazon RDS instance

Question

I have surprise with some of mysql performance. When I run simple query 'SELECT 1;' on my local host (mysql 5.6.x) using workbench, its execute in 0.000s, but the same query I ran on Amazon RDS (medium mysql 5.5.x) it tooks almost 0.094s.

I can not understand this behavior of mysql.

Answer 1

The query SELECT 1 nearly requires no parsing and no table access so its execution is quick. For remote servers however there's also the time to transmit the request and shared resources like RDS are not real-time resources, so it might take a millisecond or two to get the task executed. If there's no bigger difference then just ignore this little extra time.

Answer 2

I would propose that you go for simplicity of maintenance and scalability (which RDS apparently provides much better than local MySQL) over performance for now.

Later on, when you get insufficient output for dollar paid for Amazon, you could start measuring carefully to find bottlenecks.

Nonetheless, if you are used to maintain private tightly packed VPS servers — local MySQL could be more simple to maintain, and you should only go for external services much later :)