Why does phpMyAdmin take a long time to display a query, yet shows that the query executed fast? [closed]

Question

I'm tying to execute a query in phpMyAdmin. The query takes approximately two minutes to load, but at the top of the query results it says that the "Query took 0.2768 sec". How is this possible?

Answer 1

The larger your resultset, the slower phpMyAdmin is. The phpMyAdmin script receives the query result from MySQL in 0.2768 seconds. It then must parse the thousands of rows/columns of data in this and apply all the markup necessary to display it in your browser. This eats up time, and memory. I suggest using a command-line client if speed is a concern.