[eluser]slowgary[/eluser]
Hmmm... I thought something smelled fishy. I tried it again outside of CI and ran each loop 5 times.
Here's what I came up with:
===========================
echo: 2.13463592529 | 2.19948506355 | 2.65301418304 | 3.14114904404 | 2.65329194069
print: 2.02593612671 | 2.54435801506 | 2.82758998871 | 3.81649684906 | 4.0810148716
$buffer: 0.336583852768 | 0.341640949249 | 0.3435151577 | 0.360665798187 | 0.361016988754
The numbers stagger a little (shared hosting), but the answer's still good news. The $buffer method is way faster, but since CI has it's own output buffering, we can echo all over town and still see the performance benefits of using a buffer. Sweet!