Dear remi, You need to know that any call to a model's get() method (actually, it's a call to the ORM class and more precisely to a Query object) does not only retrieve the records from the database but also creates an object in memory for every row. Thus, if you query all rows of 35,000 rows, you will end up with 35,000 objects in memory of the Model_Client class. The biggest performance impact comes from the fact that you need memory for 35,000 objects which are created one by one. PhpMyAdmin on the other hand just takes the rows and displays the columns. There is no object creation. I'm pretty sure phpMyAdmin does nothing but echo each row's columns' values. That's why phpMyAdmin is much faster.
There's two ways to circumvent that: Either, don't query all 35,000 objects at once but go through 1,000 or 2,500 at a time. Or create stdClass objects from the query with the ->as_object() methods before calling ->get();