Does MySQL InnoDB table perform faster when data is removed
InnoDB may not release the diskspace but your query on your table is actually hitting less data. The size of your actual table has been reduced, but InnoDB will keep the storage for later growth on that table (or any other table in that database). 

Your InnoDB table may or may not perform better depending on what percentage of total rows you purged from your table. If you removed 5% of total rows, for example, you probably won't see noticable speedup (up to 5%). If you removed 90%, you'll see it speedup quite a bit. 

Some other approaches to increasing performance is writing a better query or indexing the table such that lookups are faster.