Mysql – Why are the MySQL connections running slower on localhost than through network

It's because if the DB is not on the same server as the frontend you have to do a round trip for each query (potentially more, depending on the size of the answer). It can easily take up to 1 ms to ping another server in the same datacenter. Much less if the two servers are on the same rack, but 1 ms is a good rule of thumb.

That means that for ~300 small queries you should expect ~300ms, pretty close to what you are seeing.

If the two servers are on the same machine, you only have to do some context switches between processes to move the data from the DB process to the frontend. Usually a context switch (with all the typical flushes) take ~40us (very broadly speaking), and you need at least a couple of them (frontend asks for data, DB reads requests and prepares and serves the data, and frontend reads back the data). So I would expect ~80us for each query (let's round it to 0.1ms to make the math easier). You can thus expect ~30ms for 300 small queries, which is also pretty close to what you are seeing.

Checkout mysqlslap. You can pass one of your webapp's queries with --query and specify concurrent clients with --concurrency.