Windows – Connecting to MySQL from PHP is extremely slow

I just did a fresh install of XAMPP. When first opening PHPMyAdmin I noticed it was extremely slow. It didn't make sense that on localhost it should take almost 5 seconds for every page to open. I made a small test case to shift the blame off PHPMyAdmin:

$con = new PDO("mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mysql", "root", "");
$statement = $con->query('SELECT host,user,password FROM user;');
$users = $statement->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

The above script takes just about 3 seconds to run (although it took closer to 8 seconds to load the first time I ran it.)

Then to check if it was PDO's fault I tried using mysql_connect instead:

$con = mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "");
mysql_select_db("mysql", $con);
$result = mysql_query('SELECT host,user,password FROM user;');

Takes exactly as long to finish.

I thought it was PHP's fault at first, but PHP code and static files are served snappier than I can click refresh. I tested PHP by running this little script:

header("Content-Type: text/plain");

for($i = 0; $i < 5000; $i++)
{
    echo sha1(rand()) . "\n";
}

5000 sha1 calculations and the page is still displayed snappier than I can refresh my window.

Then I figured it was MySQL's fault. But again, didn't take much testing to figure out that MySQL is working faster than I need it to. Using the MySQL CLI client the user select query doesn't even take measurable time – it's done before I've even let the return key up.

The issue must be PHP's connection to MySQL – that's as far as I've been able to reason. I can find tons of stuff about PHP being slow or MySQL being slow, but nothing about PHP+MySQL being extremely slow.

Thanks to anyone who can help me solve this!

I'm using XAMPP 1.8.0 for win32 (Download link)
PHP version: 5.4.4
MySQL version: 14.14

EDIT: After timing, it turns out it's the connect function that's taking so long:

$time = microtime(true);

$con = mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "");
mysql_select_db("mysql", $con);

$con_time = microtime(true);

$result = mysql_query('SELECT host,user,password FROM user;');

$sel_time = microtime(true);

printf("Connect time: %f\nQuery time: %f\n",
       $con_time-$time,
       $sel_time-$con_time);

Output:

Connect time: 1.006148
Query time: 0.000247

What can cause PHP to spend do much time connecting to the database? The CLI client, HeidiSQL and MySQL workbench connect instantly