What I can take from this is that when you use ORM, it slows things down considerably. Also, looking at rails example, you didn't use active record, which is really wrong.

I think you should tweak your tests to use more real world like examples. I realize it would be hard to do this across frameworks.

Like let's have a database query pull user record from 100,000 users by username. And maybe do md5 on password.