I just heard from colleagues about a very similar problem (maybe the same?) with AEM 6.5 SP21.Please report it to Adobe support, but I think that a bugfix is already on its way.
Where does the slowness happen? On author or on publish side? And when you mention "slowness", does it only affect the respective part of the replication (sending or receiving) or does it affect the entire instance and other activities as well?
I don't think that the replication API allows you to modify content (that means: changing the values of properties and/or add/remove nodes) which is then sent only to the publish, but which is not persistet on the authoring instance.