neo4j graphaware php client performance overhead

Question

I am querying my Neo4j graph via the php client at graphaware neo4j php client. Now I am experiencing a major performance drop when benchmarking via

$client = Neo4jClient::create()
    ->addConnection('bolt','bolt://neo4j:password@myhost:7687')
    ->build();
$query = "some query";
$time = microtime(true); # system time in microseconds
$result = $client->run($query);
$execms = microtime(true) - $time;
print($execms);

I get query times of about 250 ms, which is a tenfold increase easily when compared to the same query executed in the neo4j browser.

edit: Maybe I should add the the graph is only about 200 nodes large, but the query relies heavily on filtering paths. Also, of course when I run the query a second time, it is about 5 times faster because of caching.

What is the reason for this? I'm imagining maybe

• bolt protocol not properly enabled for the graphaware client
• graphaware produces overhead (unpacking results in php objects, ..)