Does anyone have considerable proof that CHAR is faster than VARCHAR?

This is simple logic, to simplify I'll take the example of a CSV file...

would it be faster to search in this line

1231;231;32345;21312;23435552;1231;1;243;211;3525321;44343112;

or this one

12;23;43;54;56;76;54;83;45;91;28;92

as long as you define your length correctly CHAR should be faster as the predefined format help the processing time.

The point is, it is not. Not by itself anyway.

What is true however, is that if there are only fixed width fields in the table, MySQL does not need to perform some calculations to find out the beginnings of each field.

Also there might be a difference for very short fields. If you compare CHAR(1) vs VARCHAR(1), the latter takes twice as much memory as the first (in single byte encodings)