[Samsung Galaxy Exhibit 4G] Bloodflame:
It's actually pretty simple. But it's definitely a good idea to do a nandroid before changing anything, as you could easily end up with bootloops, data loss, corruption, or other adverse effects. That said, backup your SD too. Never a bad thing to play it safe. You've been warned! Please note that this guide assumes you're using a Jelly Bean AOSP variant such as CM10, AOKP, Paranoid Android, or PACman. So without further ado, my performance tweaking guide:

Settings > Performance

Processor - Set max CPU to 1708MHz with Performance governor. Minimum doesn't matter because Performance always uses the max setting. Personally, I wouldn't recommend this for daily use - just useful for squeezing out benchmark results. In the case of daily use, go with either 1401MHz or 1516MHz max, and 368MHz min with SmartassV2 governor. Set to boot.

I/O Scheduler - A full description of each setting can be found here. Basically, you'll want VR for max benchmark results, or CFQ for daily use. You could always experiment to see what works best for you, however. Please note: There might be a bug in some ROMs that don't allow you to change I/O settings from this menu. If you have AOKP ROM Control, SetCPU, or another overclocking app, make adjustments there instead.

Memory Management - Set zRam to 18%, as it's a good medium. Basically what we're doing here is trying to maximize available memory by compressing the data being used in RAM, but note that performance is affected negatively. 10% will give slightly better performance at the cost of multi-tasking, but 26% will actually slow things down probably a bit too much (you'll have a lot of free RAM though). Using any of these settings will improve multi-tasking over having it disabled entirely. Choose your poison wisely. Check the two boxes for 'Allow purging of assets' and 'Kernel samepage merging'. These really do help to improve performance.

Finally, check the box for '16bit transparency' and reboot!

Settings > Developer Options

Scroll down to Drawing section. There are 3 animation scales (window, transition, animator). Set these to either 0.5x or disable entirely for an improvement in perceived performance. While they don't actually make the phone faster, they give the illusion of being faster. Set 'Window animation scale' to 5x or 10x for a better example of slowing it down, and you'll know what I mean. In the same menu, there's a checkbox for 'Force GPU rendering'. At this time, there wouldn't be any noticeable effect, as hardware acceleration is not yet implemented into the kernel or ROM's for our device. Usually this would improve performance quite a bit (I've experienced it on my old Acer A500) however some apps don't respond very nicely. In our case, it's pretty pointless at this time. As for the animation scales, they play no part in benchmarks, but it's nice when your phone feels faster, wouldn't you agree?

Pimp My ROM

First, download the app from the Play Store. When applying tweaks, you'll be prompted to reboot every time you click the button. No need to reboot until everything is done. Not everything is performance related, but everything plays its part somewhere.

XDA Thread | Google Play Store

Universal Init.d Support - Plain and simple, this kernel is already supported out of the box. Click the Verify button if you don't believe me.

Networks & Internet - Build.prop tweaks enabled: Wifi Connect Speed, Faster Streaming, Faster DNS. Init.d & Syscrl Tweaks: Protect against SYN attacks, IPv4 Tweaks

Multitasking - I left these at the default values

Kernel Tweaks - Also left these at the default values

Dalvik VM - Use JIT, Move Dalvik-Cache to /cache

GPS Configuration - Default

Enable/Disable Features - Default

Miscellaneous Tweaks - Init.d & Sysctl Tweaks: Optimize sqlite3 Databases, Internal SD-Card I/O Tweaks, External SD-Card I/O Tweaks, Zipalign all APKs at each boot, Battery Savings. Build.prop Tweaks left untouched.

Apps and Mods - Did nothing here, but there's some interesting features to be found.

Finally, don't forget to reboot

A much more in-depth guide can be found here, but what I've mentioned in this post is what I've done to achieve my 4911 AnTuTu score. I'll be doing a few more tweaks throughout the next couple of days. My goal right now is to break 5000 - I'm very close! If I can achieve that, I'll post it for sure.

Edits:

November 14th: updated Pimp My ROM link