If the application you are having problems with does a lot of reading and writing to files a quick fix might be to use a RAM based file system.  Yes that precious RAM we all love to have for our apps might be better spent creating a temporary file system.  If you then copy the often written to application files onto this RAM based file system you should see tremendous performance increases.  With systems running the Core i7 architecture the boost could be even higher because of the higher RAM speeds and lower latency between the CPU and the chips.  The only way to find out though is to give it a try.  To do that you will need a RAM Disk of some kind.  I found this how to over at Linux Mag that should be a good starting point.  While I haven’t done these exact instructions, I have done this before and they seem to be correct.  As with anything though your mileage may very.  Test your solution thoroughly before implementing this in a production environment.  Remember you are dealing with RAM and if you have to reboot anything not saved off from that RAM Disk will be lost.