Being part of the Beat testers group, I'm running the new ZWave firmware update since Saturday around noon. Since that time I'm also running Hub Watchdog every 10 minutes and that's wonderful !
Before the firmware update, I had 4-6 slowdowns per day. Since then, I have one slowdown between 2AM and 3AM and everything is fast for the rest of the day. I suspect that HE is doing a maintenance or something around 2AM. So right now that's a wonderful improvement.