CIF can be greatly accelerated using an overlay of the Sphinx search engine on top of the Postgres database.  Query times should be reduced to one or two milliseconds for most queries at a cost of re-indexing all values when they are updated.  Sphinx provides a standard MySQL database handle for the indexed data.  The included CIF.psgi contains all of the code needed to function as a standalone web frontend to the Sphinx database handle.  Alternatively, it can be used in conjuction with Apache.  Please see the INSTALL doc, which doubles as an install script, for details.