Yeah I agree with Martin, there’s only a handful of important settings to tweak. The thing to have in mind is that if you are trying to get render times down, you are most likely making tradeoffs, usually it’s: less time rendering = lower final quality. More time rendering = better final quality. There is a point where you can shoot too many samples and the render is already very clean and you’re just wasting time. So you need to make tests, with parts of the render as Martin says, to see how many samples is enough until your image is clean. After that you can decide what to do, if you sacrifice some noise here and there or less light bounces but then you have less global illumination, trade this for this, etc, in order to shave some render time.
