In search of performance we also developed a non-blocking MySQL driver for Python (and gevent). It's used by our real-time web framework, Planet (http://www.planetframework.com).

While we could've gotten better performance with more processes, we wanted to stick with one process per core. Given this and a non-blocking driver we naturally got a good performance gain.

amysql, as it's called, is up on GitHub: https://github.com/esnme/amysql