Memory usage question...

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]

...they seemed to think 2mb was a large memory load.

This is the same 2MB that is .. uhm .. 1.3 floppy disks, right?

If you're concerned about performance, and you see an application taking up 3MB, you can pretty much instantly rule out memory as your problem (unless you're on a C=64) - in which case props to writing a VM system to get around the 38KB limitation.

But seriously ... if you're in doubt, you need to play with the bundled CI Profiler class - it's very powerful, and very good at showing you where your time is being taken up in the script (you just need to put in a few marks, as I mentioned). Have a read of the [url="http://ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/general/profiling.html"]CI Profiling Library page[/url] - it's well documented.

If you are still stuck after that, then there's a nice little PHP Firebug extension I was starting to play with last week, but haven't got back to - it requires a library to be installed and loaded, and a plug-in to Iceweasel (sometimes called Firefox on lesser platforms) but promises to give some pretty gnarly statistics in return.