Recursion VS CTE

Hi there! I have an application that uses stored procedures wuth CTE statements to populate trees from database. Every second I need to populate 100-300 trees each one of them has 15-20 nodes. I checked those procedures with profiler and payed attention that populate procedure with CTE is slower that others (without CTE) per 1000 times! Would procedures with recursion faster than same ones with CTE? I am asking because I read somewhere that CTE is becomes slower while populating little chunks of data. Is that right and I should use recursions?

And second question: here the code -



Code Snippet

;WITH dt (Id, NodeText, PId, State, RowNumber) AS
(
SELECT Id, NodeText, PId, State, ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY Id) AS RowNumber
FROM DataTable
WHERE Id = 1

UNION ALL

SELECT d.Id, d.NodeText, d.PId, d.State, ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY d.Id) AS RowNumber
FROM DataTable AS d
INNER JOIN dt ON dt.Id = d.PId
)

SELECT * FROM dt




This is how I populate a tree with CTE. Could you give me some example how to do exactly same but with recursion?(without CTE). Thank you!