An effective approach for circuit performance improvement in VLSI symbolic layout compaction is presented. The approach is different from traditional approaches which aim at minimizing the total wire length; it directly optimizes the length of critical synchronous paths. Moreover, the critical synchronous paths are optimized before the layout size is minimized. The problem is so complicated that graph-theoretical algorithms for the general compaction problem cannot be used. Therefore, a new algorithm which consists of a graph-based technique and the simplex algorithm is proposed for the problem. Experimental results show that this algorithm is quite efficient.