model loading is awful

[eluser]BrianDHall[/eluser]
I will also suggest you look into getting a debugger working on your system with CI, such as with Netbeans or whatever you prefer. A quick breakpoint set inside a controller function shows you everything that's loaded, and you'll find there really isn't _that_ much, and what is there is all pretty useful.

Turning on profiling, even using benchmarking, also shows that CI requires extremely little overhead to produce its output - I believe lower than any framework in existence.

An isolated statistic, divorced of its proper context, is perhaps without exception either a) a misunderstanding or b) a pretext for a previously arrived at conclusion.