The thing is, those are all I/O bound operations and in the case of the databases most of the code you're benchmarking is native extensions, so I would expect the difference to be negligible.
Testing whole Rails apps really does seem like the best way to get good data. The interesting speedups are likely going to be in places like string matching / string copying and other places that don't involve network access.
Testing whole Rails apps really does seem like the best way to get good data. The interesting speedups are likely going to be in places like string matching / string copying and other places that don't involve network access.