A more efficient pagination library?

So the pagination library works great for working with smaller data sets. However I need to paginate a table of 500,000 records and the pagination is dogshit slow with some queries taking upwards of 30s to run.

I've been reading about it recently and am interested in implementing a more efficient pagination. Couple of articles here:

https://www.xarg.org/2011/10/optimized-p...ing-mysql/
https://www.eversql.com/faster-paginatio...t-is-slow/

Has anyone already implemented a faster pagination library for CodeIgniter before I embark on doing similar myself?