ionCube and Codeigniter

Hello guys, currently i'm working on a project which requires alot of seciruty. I stumbled upon a problem with the source code being plain php and human readable. After googling for PHP obfuscators i found ionCube which claims to be the best. Like veryone else i aske the one million dollars question: what about the performance??

On their website they claim that ionCube  doesn't effect the speed that much and it might actually speed up the code

Q. Do encoded files or the loader affect performance?


A. Not much, and when the loader is installed in the php.ini file, encoded files may run faster than the unencoded scripts. Unlike unencoded scripts and those from source based encoders, ionCube encoded files are compiled and optimised at encoding time, and so don't need to be parsed or compiled at runtime. This reduces the usual overhead in PHP, and offsets the performance overheads of the code protection.

Since i have no experience with php encryption i wanna know your opinion. Is it a good practice to use ionCube for high security projects? Does it really good idea to use it?