Blender-Boosters is a script/plugin designed to find optimal render settings for reducing Blender 3Ds render time on any given machine.
When you run the script it will optimize the render settings and then render your entire animation.
Unfortunately boosters is windows only currently.
Blender-Boosters uses a genetic algorithm to optimize render settings for a given scene on a given machine. It does this by rendering several sample/prototype renders with different settings. Then out of the samples it uses the the settings that rendered the image the fastest and continues to iterate upon that prototype, repeating the process for several generations until you hopefully have much more time efficient settings for your set up.