Perforce is not fast, it cheats: You tell the server in advance what you are doing, so that the submit is fast. This comes at a tremendous price: Your editor/IDE has to have a perforce plugin to do what should be the VCS' job (tell perforce what is happening in your workspace), and the connection to the server has to be reliable and low latency, lest you want to spend seconds every time you make an edit in a file that has not been checked out already.

In practice, this model is a constant source of frustration, and everything Perforce has done in the last few years seems to be workarounds for this broken architecture.