I found that if I make my dock 6 to 7 "ticks" smaller than the maximum, it is usually enough extra room to accommodate more dock items without having to scale the current items. The speed improvement is really noticeable, and makes using even a sometimes processor-intensive "genie effect" to shrink and expand dock items much more bearable.
[Editor's note: I don't use the dock in this manner (I'm hopelessly addicted to "hide" as opposed to "minimize"), but it does make sense -- the scaling operation can take some time, especially if you have a large number of items in your dock.]

