We are looking at a few perfomance optimizations. The 2.0.2.8 canary build has a faster hashing method, which improves performance a bit.
You can also set --zip-compression-level=1 (or 0 if you really don’t care for compression) to reduce the amount of time spent on compression.
For a file-based target (i.e. locally mounted disk), you can set the --tempdir= option to point to a temporary folder on the destination disk. Then also set --use-move-for-put=true and --disable-streaming-transfers which will disable all the throttle/progress/etc and just use a simple “move” command to move the zip archive into the destination folder.