PHP: What's the fastest way to query MySQL? Because PDO is painfully slow

[othings]

I need to perform a simply query. Literally, all I need to perform is:\[code\]SELECT price, sqft, zipcode FROM homes WHERE home_id = X\[/code\]When I use PHP PDO, which I've read is the recommended way to connect to a MySQL database, simply creating the connection takes a measured 610ms.My code is below:\[code\]try { $conn_str = DB . ':host=' . DB_HOST . ';dbname=' . DB_NAME; $dbh = new PDO($conn_str, DB_USERNAME, DB_PASSWORD); $params = array(); $sql = 'SELECT price, sqft, zipcode FROM homes WHERE home_id = :home_id'; $params[':home_id'] = X; $stmt = $dbh->prepare($sql); $stmt->execute($params); $result_set = $stmt->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC); // json output ob_start("ob_gzhandler"); header('Content-type: text/javascript; charset=utf-8'); print "{'homes' : "; print json_encode( $result_set ); print '}'; ob_end_flush(); $dbh = null;} catch (PDOException $e) { die('Unable to connect');}\[/code\]Question: What's the fastest way for me to connect to my MySQL database to perform the query above?