Asset server slowness

We recently (as of this past week) have moved from SVN over to the Team License setup MAINLY to take advantage of the Cache server (our assets were taking hours on top of hours to process for iOS projects) and decided we'd check out the Asset server side of things to see if it simplifies anything.

Sadly.. it didn't.

Moving the project over was easy... and the in interface integration is awesome but we are seeing significant delays in ANY process related to the asset server. Commits or even see what needs to be commited can take as long as 15-20 minutes on a given machine (I've been waiting now for almost 10 minutes to even get connected to the server). So this leads me to a couple of questions because i can't imagine the asset server itself is really the bottle neck here.

1) We are a small team.. there are only 3 of us using this setup. The asset server is on an imac.. its definitely older (its only a dual core) and has 4 gigs of memory. Additionally we are running the Cache server (which runs flawlessly) on a mac mini sitting next to it so i know there aren't any conflicts there. Would the speed of said machine be causing the monumental slowdowns wer'e seeing? Is there a minspec (or perhaps a min operating system) we'd be required to setup

2) Network.. we're currently on a speedy wireless network. obviously being on a wired network would make for faster data transfers, but would it really effect the simple communication to the server?

3) Short of spending thousands of $$'s on top of what we've already spent... are there any recommendations that could be passed along wrt speeding up the commits? It is a relatively large project.. it only has around 12,000 files in total but there is a large amount of data (movies and textures mainly), all of which are required for the project (we keep it pretty clean from unnecessary files).

any help would be outstanding. we are really interested in keeping the Asset server/cache server setup just for the simplicity of it (SVN has its own host of problems i don't want to get into). If we have to step away from it thats fine... although we do love the cache server (kinda pricey at 500 a seat just for that though).

cheers
Bryan