Did you run the profiler on your code? As mentioned in Nik, you must download images from the network asynchronously using GCD or NSOperation. You can watch the Harvard iTunesU video for NSOperation: this will give you a clear example with good explanations.
And you must definitely run the profiler to find out where you spend the most time. A cell with multiple images should load quickly.
Please note that some operations with the cell that can be performed during initialization (for example, setting the background color in the cell) can lead to high costs if you do them again.
If you have a special layout for your cell, you must subclass UITableViewCell and implement the layoutSubviews method (remember to call super). Doing a lot of work in the ViewDataSourceDelegate table (and forcing relay redirection) can really be inefficient.
But then again: run the profiler
source share