general suggestions to make CH faster and more responsive?

Are you using illustrator or photoshop? How many layers and what resolution? If too high of resolution in photoshop (rare) it might slow things down at a guess.

One thing that can help is using multiple simpler puppets sharing the same artwork instead of one mega puppet to keep puppet complexity lower. Eg have a walk puppet without all the standing triggers.

When recording, the number of meshes, scene resolution etc all make a difference. You can change some settings in scene properties i think while creating a scene. But test flipping back to normal resolution for real content. eg changing fps later will mess up all your recordings.

Try searching the forums too - there have been some good suggestions in the past.