An understanding of performance of database driven network applications is critical in combating slow performance of e-commerce web sites, besides efficient web page design, and high quality and well-maintained web server equipment. This paper describes a method of measuring performance from the user viewpoint, which can help enormously in making realistic assessment of true performance of database driven applications. The performance measurements were taken at user locations by using several specially designed JavaScript functions along with ASP scripts. A performance study is presented in this paper, comparing performance of data access using stored procedures with the traditional way of querying a database. It is generally believed that stored procedures have performance benefits as they are pre-compiled. However, our study shows that the data access approach using stored procedures provides significant benefits(by about 30%) over the traditional approach for querying a commercial MySQL database, only when retrieving a substantial amount of data(at least 10,000 rows of data).