TOPIC:

We have observed that graphic heavy PDF's render very slowly on the reader and gives the illusion that it is broken. For example, a locally referenced file such as the one found here: theinstitute.ieee.org/ns/quarterly_issues/tisep16.pdf , will take several seconds to load the cover page.
Has anyone know how to enhance the performance?

I've just finished a quick test on your file.
On my actual android device performances seems to be (from faster to slower):
- mupdf
- pdftron, radaee, pspdfkit
- Adobe (many many seconds)
- foxit (,many many many seconds,)

The main reason is that your cover page, and some other pages, contains a huge amount of vector polygons.
Such vector drawings needs many computations to be rendered.
Are you testing iOS or android?

I am testing in iOS 9,3+ and Android 6+

The solution we can implement is user-level (spin wheel as in Android version) but as mentioned above, the page contains many vector objects and is slow on all rendering engines (ours and commercial competitors).
The only definitive solution can be obtained by optimizing the PDF file.