Can you eager load the relationships, and paginate them? That might speed things up.

This could be an index problem, did you create an index of the most important columns ('cstatus', 'cdates', 'ccategory', 'ccreator',"cpermissions", "cpermissions.ccategory", "cpermissions.cdates", "cpermissions.czones") in the where clause?

I agree with oden, start by checking/creating indexes and see if that helps.

Something else you can do, turn on query logging and grab the raw query and run it through explain just to make sure you are right about the DB transaction time.

I am loading close to 5k records at once with json and it takes close to 2.5 seconds to load....