Hello!
I tried several distribution and i have not found anyone that boots as fast as Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon x64.
No, i do not work for Mint
Not saying that it's the best distro, but it sure boots fast.
Sure, my laptop specs are pretty good with a i7, 8gb ram and SSD, but i have tried the linuxBBQ flavours and they are pretty lightweight with only console programs, etc. I have also tried other net-installed distros to keep them as lightweight as possible but they are still slower than fullblown mint.
Mint boots to login prompt in 2 secs and another sec to get to desktop after i input password.
And the quickest console only distros takes around 10 secs to console login prompt...
The difference that i see is that when most lightweight distro's boot, the screen is in console mode with a lot of text and commands flying by.
But when mint boots, the screen is black for a few secs and then i get directly to a graphical login.
I have read up on the differences and i think it has to do with that mint uses systemd for startup? Also it seems like console distros takes a longer time getting ip address?
Cheers!
Alexander

I'll leave others to answer your question, but Mint doesn't use systemd for startup by default, it uses upstart. You can optionally use systemd if you so desire.

It's very likely that Mint 18 will switch to systemd.

Aah, sorry, i must have mixed it up. Thanks for the correction.
Ok, i will read up on upstart and check what other distros use it and see if they are as fast.

I was going to joke and say it was because it was Irish.

I think the way it boots may be an answer if not the correct answer.

Other ideas could be that it was configured a bit better for your hardware. Maybe a number of choices.