Daniel Dalton writes:
[gnome3 is slow]
Since no one else has mentioned it... bootchart. Two parts, one that makes a tarball of /proc every tenth of a second, the other turns that into a pretty Gantt-style chart so you can see what is taking all the clock time. You ought to be able to start it up *post* boot to graph gnome3's startup instead of the initrd-to-rc.local processes. There are multiple implementations of both bits. IMO the easiest for the former is the one included in busybox. The latter try pybootchart2 (from git? can't remember if it has been released). There is an older version in java which I automatically dismiss. IIRC you're also visually impaired, so I dunno how helpful it is. Hopefully at least as good as the existing "buy fastar hardware" and "don't run gnome3" responses :-)