Has anyone found actually useful optimization methods for the bulky, fat, eclipse giant, nuissance that is Lotus Notes 8.5?

I want it to be fast, and not eat up system resources like crazy while I run it ALL day (as it is my company's corporate mail / cal / scheduling solution).

I've tried various hacks for the JVM heap size (if I recall correctly). None really bring a performance improvement.

I have a dual core cpu, if that helps (I tried going the route of optimizing JAVA for 2 cores in hopes it would work, but seen no speed improvement).

Notes is just sooo bloated, anyone have any suggestions to optimize/mod this thing so it is more responsive and less of a resource hog.

Note: I don't want to switch to the web version, or the standard stripped down versions, I am aware of those, I just cannot since we don't run those internally for the company.