Performance is concern, Should use CI?

[eluser]Nick Husher[/eluser]
On the other hand, unless you're doing a search query for '*' or something that contains a huge result set, your performance overhead isn't as bad as it could be. ORM tools, particularly ones that have aggressive data retrieval schemes, definitely multiply that overhead, though.

The best way to improve query times is to reindex your data for faster access and use caching techniques to capture common searches. There are plenty of resources to help out with that, but not here. It's outside the scope of a PHP framework.