once again you are asking a classically wrong question. From your own observation

-HOWEVER- whether using either way, BOTH fetchall-arrayref and bind_columns methods take about the same amount of time to display the results on the browser, again around 12-16 seconds.

So, why not use Benchmark and find out if one or the other is significantly faster? Either way, you are getting the same results. And, either way, you are likely to discover that getting the data from the db is probably just a fraction of a second or just a wee bit more. Most of the time is probably spent in assembling the html, sending it via the server, and the cable modem, up to you, and then rendering it on your computer. So, even if you manage to speed up a 200 microsecond job by 500% (the db work), you will still be stuck with 11-15 seconds of other grunt work.

My advice -- use Benchmark, adjust, and then quit worrying, or else, put a throttle on your max rows returned and page the results n at a time.

Good luck.