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Speed is a combination of several factors. Some can be controlled immediately others can not. Generally, if you want speed, you must be willing to give up the convenience of binaries and binary based distributions. Yeap, I said it. I don't care what binary based distribution you use, as long as your binaries a compiled for a general and most often old (i386, i486, i586), they will always be slower (dog slow) and usually larger than most sourced based distributions and sometimes even unstable. Period.

Very good source based distributions provide you with the flexibility to tune your binaries to you system's specific architecture, and also the options to enable certain flags. If you know what you are doing you could gain significant improvements memory and processor wise by manipulating these flags correctly.

For example, ever since I started using the -Os flag (man gcc for more info) I've noticed memory usage has reduced drastically by more than half. Something that had never before happened in my usage of Linux. At first, I thought it was my monitors and sensors acting up. I later observed that the -O2/3 options used by many binary, even some, source distros drastically enlarges the size of binary. The benefits of that are, they claim, good runtime optimizations. But the drawback is that larger binaries are slower to load and also Runtime optimizations aren't visible to desktop users, most of us. Not to mention that most binary based distros don't strip debugging sysmbols from their binaries again, increasing it size and slowness.

To cut the long story short, it will be a while before binary based distros match the speed and flexibility given by source based distro. Binary based distros provide convenience and quick installation. True source based distros are horrible to set up, and very large packages (openoffice) are time consuming to install. But the benefit is a streamlined package compiled and built for your system, and more often than not it's much stable than the one built for a general arch, with debugging symbols enabled, and generally large bins.

Of course, there are other tricks to speed up your system. But I'm in no mood to discuss those. Do a google. If you have the time, more often than not, it's better to compile packages from the source using the appropriate flags for your system. If not for anything for stability. A few months ago there was a package compiled with a general arch that was very on stable on the Athlons or Athlon-XP. I can't seem to remember the package. I remember pulling several strands of my hair of before the bug was made known to me. Of course most people don't have the time for all this. Convenience and ease is tempting but don't come complaining that your system is slow. :-P