Things start rolling! mysqlnd is among the five most desired features for PHP 5.3 according to a PHP 5.3 Feature Summary email from Ilia, who – at the time of writing – was doing the release management of PHP.

Thanks everybody for your trust in mysqlnd and your support! We shall try not to disappoint you in the future and continue with the development. Of course, as the core feature mature more and more, we will try to spend time on implementing new, useful tricks and try to provide you with additional documentation, if time permits.

Meanwhile we are still looking for your feedback. Tell us about your positive and negative experiences with mysqlnd. Jürgen Krieger did so in his forums posting and concludes And i have to say that the mysqlnd is awesome. .

He used Xdebug and system statistics to test PHP 5 with mysqlnd. Some of his findings:

• Connection time has gone down: from ~900ms down to ~320ms
• Better query time: from ~350ms down to ~300ms
• Less memory consumption: ~30% according to server statistics

All in all he describes the mysqlnd test run with:

as result (in dev enviroment … have to state this out as our dev is REAL slow)
we gain a average boost of 1000ms retrieving a page which originally took us 3.4 seconds.
That’s quite awesome.

Source: http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?52,175718,175718#msg-175718.

Ok, but what did I not mention so far? Well, the usual. Jürgen needed some compile/installation procedure information. If you want to compile mysqlnd, read this old posting with instructions how to install mysqlnd from the MySQL internal SVN. SVN/MySQL internal repository times should be gone soon – forever. Hopefully they will be gone once we have all code in the php.net CVS and we use the CVS as the one and only development place. By that time, we’ll update installation instructions as well. Stay tuned for further news on this.

Also, I did not mention some other quirks he found. You want to hear them? I promise to tell them with the next user report. Will you be the next user to give feedback? Positive or negative feedback, we build on your support! Don’t hesitate to nag us, if we miss your message on any of the usual places.