I tried the parallels option some time ago and clocked the boot time. It may be due to my ssd but it didn't have any impact on the boot time (also my shutdown process stuck sometimes), so I changed it back.
I updated the wiki page to fix broken links and old references. Also, two new sections have been added. One is on running Chrome in memory with performance improving flags. You'll notice your pages loading faster, almost instantly for the ones you've already visited.