Extremely slow speed on my site using codeignitor... is this normal?

[eluser]cahva[/eluser]
What kind of figures are you getting when using profiler? If you havent done that, then please do as it will give you much info what you can improve.

For caching database(and other stuff too) I recommed Cache library by Phil Sturgeon. You have lot of dynamic content and that is what this is meant to be used.

For example I have developed an ecommerce software that is ORM-driven and has a lot of database queries. With a very large category the queries could climb very high like 300-500. With caching, queries are lowered to about 5(and those come from session which arent cached) and most of the time site(s) run very smoothly.