What version of elive has you installed? For example, elive 1.7.2 have service "laptop-mode", which tries to reduce power usage, even on PCs, so, after some time of idle, it will stop HDD's motor, until some process won't try to get access to disk, then it bring it back to running state... that is slow, so try to move laptop-mode from /etc/init.d/ dir and see: may be this is the solution...
by the way, there are some scripts in /etc/init.d/ that unaccessary to you: e.g. related to bluetooth, eeepc and others - just move them to another dir to get some free mem...
PS: i've installed elive 1.0.2 on very old compaq proliant 1500 server with 2x Pentium 133 processors, 128MB RAM, 3x 4.2GB HDDs and it works not so slow for that machine