Technical Questions on Very Heavy Puppet

Hi, I have been posting a bunch about the motion canpture and MIDI automation to control the puppet. Right now I am working on creating the pipeline, where I can create animation once (walking, running, backflip etc.) and another puppet will be able to follow it as long as it rigger the same way.

The thing is, the way I am doing it one puppet is consist of 8 puppets (front, back, left right + 4 different 3/4) that I cycle through based on my automation (or you can attach a bunch of them to a case turn behavior).

Obviosely, performace is getting a hit even on my powerful machine. My questions:

1) How much of an effect rasterising brings to a perfomrmance? Does that mace sense to convert bubbet to raster in illistrator? Flatten layers? Is that expect to improve things significantly or just a little bit?

2) Are visible and invisible layers have same effect on performance or visible are heavirer?

3) If I add extra layers without art (just to organise things better). Will empty layers affect performance? Do we want to minimise the number of layers in the puppet?

Would be nice to hear input. I am working on making animations for a game, so set of actions that can be transfered to other characters would go a long way. And with Ch we can have different tings dangle, so same motion should look different.

Just need to find a way to fin in the pieces