I use Rizful for my Lightning node, connected to Amethyst via NWC, and zaps are almost instantaneous. The purple wheel of death spins around very quickly, and the zap indicator lights up almost immediately. I don't use Alby anymore, but when I did it was similarly fast. I think the only times when it lagged were due to issues on the receiving end. Are you running your own backend, or are you using Alby Cloud to host your node?