I’ve run into the same issue here but I may be found the problem.
I’ve opened up the resource monitor and looking at network speed.
The scene is loaded from NAS.
When live Houdini is loading scene it pulls full speed from NAS and loads in seconds, a bit over 500 MB scene.
But when I monitor Houdini from the deadline and worker log, when it stats loading scene it pulls only at a speed of half a megabyte per second. And then it takes 18 minutes just to load the scene.
So even loading every time is not that big of an issue, an inconvenience but not a big issue, but the speed of loading is.
Also to mention this is with single machine loading from NAS while testing so no bottlenecking or anything like it.