Gentoo:Tips and tricks

Put /usr/portage on a separate partition. Running emerge sync is a process that is almost entirely limited by the speed at which rsync can access various files in your portage directory. When you run 'emerge sync' the program has to go through every file in the portage directory generating hashes. Having /usr/portage on the same partition with other parts of your system means that new additions to the portage tree get spread across your filesystem. Putting the portage directory on its own partition prevents portage files from being interleaved within your other files and seek time is reduced to a minimum for a sync operation.

Your boot time can be sped up a lot if you have many rc scripts that get run at system startup. On nearly all default setups these scripts load iteratively. There is a flag that lets you load init.d scripts in parallel. In /etc/conf.d/rc (or your applicable rc file) set RC_PARALLEL_STARTUP to "yes" instead of "no".