I know this will sound weird, but unplugging my network cable dramatically speeds up my loading of large assemblies in V5. I think it's the way IT set up my Catia though and because of my physical distance from the server. (Sorry, this gets a little long and is probably a very specific condition that few others will see).
Our design team is split up into three countries around the world, the US, France and China. There are approximately 40-50 designers in each country. We use Smarteam for CAD data management, and each country has its own server that syncs with the other two every 5 minutes to keep data current around the world. In the US we have two offices, our headquarters in California with about 40 designers and an office in Detroit (where I am) with 4 designers. The US Catia license server and Smarteam server are both in California. Acessing Smarteam through the Catia imbedded interface in Detroit does not work because the network connection is too slow, so we use a web-based interface that is separate from Catia. We do have access to all the company servers (Catia and non-Catia) through a WAN, so we are connected to our offices in California but the connection is slow (compared to being in California).
How I work is that I download data from Smarteam through the web, work locally on my laptop, and then upload it again when I'm done. Since I visit the customer I am able to pull a node-lock license for Catia and work when not connected to the network. What I found was that an assembly that would take about 10 minutes to load when in the office (connected to the network) would only take about 2 minutes to load when at the customer (not connected to the network). I did a back to back test at the office with my network cable plugged in and with it unplugged and verified the results.
I was shocked at the difference, so I started looking at settings in Catia. What I thought was happening was in Tools/Options/General/Document there is a setting for 'Linked Document Localization' that tells Catia where it can search for pointed documents (I think that's what it is for, at least). Smarteam is at the top of the list, followed by 'Folder of the pointing document' and 'Folder of the link'. I assume Catia is trying to search Smarteam for linked documents first so it tries to access the Smarteam server in California, times out, then starts searching locally. I explained the issue to our IT guy, but he is too busy to look into the problem because I've already found a work-around by unplugging the network cable. The setting is locked so I was not able to experiment and see if either disabling the 'Smarteam' setting or moving it so it had lower priority than 'Folder of the pointing document' or 'Folder of the link' made any difference.
Anyways, that's another possible suggestion for speeding up the connection. It is a rather specific set of conditions though, so it may not be of any help to you. If anyone has any suggestions about what is causing my slowdown, I'd love to hear it.
As others have said, using the cache helps a lot too.
Good luck,
Bob