It doesn't seem slow to me.

I have a 450 page book that as part of the compile generates a 200 page answer answer manual. They are full of math, hyperlinked cross references, figures, etc. They use tons of packages including amsmath, hyperref, and many more. Compiling takes perhaps 15 seconds. This means compiling twice, to resolve references.

TeX itself is quite fast, it's loading all the extra packages that slows things down.