There are a few hundred components in each sub-assembly. A lot of Bolts, washers, nuts.
I tried doing the linear array, and I did seem to notice an improvement. Where I was having a problem was after adding these big arrays via Instance Feature, any subsequent components that I tried to constrain would be really slow while working in the Add Constraints dialog. Picking the entities and updating the positions would lag quite a bit; very noticeable decrease in performance.
I'm wondering if it has anything to do with the fact that doing and array with Instance Feature creates constraints for each an every component, whereas Linear array doesn't. Is there a limit or threshold on the number of constraints you can have in an assembly before taking a performance hit?