How is the SHA-1 collision detector so fast?
One trick used by the collision detector you mention is to check for "unavoidable conditions", described in the paper here: http://oai.cwi.nl/oai/asset/23932/23932A.pdf

Essentially, the unavoidable conditions are a faster check, but may have false positives. If a given block meets these conditions, the detector then runs the full check. Per the paper above, the total cost of doing this is only 1.96 times the regular SHA-1 runtime.