I've ran a simple test to see the performance impact of TLS on MySQL connections with MySQL Connector/Python The test results are in this Jupyter notebook . TL;DR: Try to reuse connections if you use TLS Establishing TLS connections is expensive (server & client) Improved performance might be possible in the future by using TLS Tickets Not tested: Difference between YaSSL and OpenSSL Difference between Ciphersuites Performance of larger resultsets and queries

The source of this post is in this gist on nbviewer. After reading about the difference between MySQL Connector/Python and MySQLdb on this blog post I wondered how the C Extension option in Connector/Python would perform. If you want to run the code yourself you'll need: Jupyter/IPython, Python 3, Requests, MySQLdb, Connector/Python, Matplotlib, Pandas and MySQL. In [1]: % matplotlib notebook In [2]: import random import gzip import time import pandas as pd import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import requests import mysql.connector import MySQLdb for imp in [ mysql . connector , MySQLdb ]: print ( 'Using {imp} {version}' . format ( imp = imp . __name__ , version = imp . __version__ )) print ( 'C Extension for MySQL Connector/Python available: %s' % mysql . connector . HAVE_CEXT ) Using mysql.connector 2.1.3 Using MySQLdb 1.3.7 C Extension ...