On semi related note, I found a big improvement in Slackware's boot-up time by editing rc files and adding “&” every here and there allowing various tasks to be run in parallel.

Even without SSD I already got more speed improvement by putting my system into an lzo-compressed squashfs on mechanical HDD.
I am more willing to try ext4 defrag on my home partition and not the system partion.

That's an interesting idea! How do you handle updates?

I am actually using aufs3 over squashfs. I apply updates normally and try out for a few days. During this time I do not turn off the system but rather suspend to disk, so my writable branch, which is a tmpfs, will not get erased. If nothing broken by the update, I reboot to my regular system (on ext4, without squashfs, aufs and etc.) doing the updates again, and make a new "sysimage" squashfs image. I also have a "changes" image, which is layered on "sysimage". I put small changes, such as kernel module updates, changes to "/etc" and so on into the small "changes" filesystem image so I don't have to compress the whole system for minor changes that do not affect speed.

Example filesystem structure:

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