[eluser]nizsmo[/eluser]
In regards to which is faster and slower, if your hosting doesn't have short tags enabled, and you are re-writing the short tags on the fly (Codeigniter has the ability to do this, just enable in the config) then I would imagine it would be considerably slower than the full-tag, simply because it doesn't need to be re-written on the fly (which uses regular expression, eval() and str_replace all together in one, last time I checked.)
Though don't quote me on this, benchmark and the results should speak for itself :-)
