You had a search engine and rendering the search results was the bottleneck? That's really weird. Don't know a lot about JSF but other templating languages are

You had a search engine and rendering the search results was the bottleneck? That's really weird. Don't know a lot about JSF but other templating languages are usually really not ever the bottleneck. Maybe if you have some giant table with thousands of cells each with its own complicated template directive (for loop with conditionals etc).