<p>We happily use SVN for SCM at work.  Currently I've got our binary assets in the same SVN repository as our code.  SVN supports very large files (it transmits them 'streamily' to keep memory usage sane), but it makes everything SLOOWWWWW.  I'm ok with slow asset versioning, but slow text operations isn't really acceptable.  </p>

<p>Right now assets are under /trunk/release (side by side with a dozen /trunk/projects).  Should we keep them in a separate repository?  What other optimizations can we do?  We have about a GB of assets and growing.</p>

You didn't say what optimizations you use already. If you are using bsdfs, see whether switching to fsfs improves performance. If you have a large number of revisions, switch to a more recent version on the server, and convert the repository to the 1.5 format.