I’m using vray, wanted to set up backburner so I have all my materials being pulled on the local machine through the network.

This makes it painfully slow.

Is there anyway to speed this up?

should I not pull the materials through the network?  If I don’t will the other computer find the materials?

There is an option in the Job Submition dialog “Include Maps”, this is designed for people with slow networks who are getting delayed by all the maps going through the network. It will zip all the maps up after submition and sent them to each node then so they all have a local copy to read from. Though it seems a lot of people seem to use this option as a lazy way getting nodes to find maps without using network paths. Without this option on the maps stay in their original location on the server or workstation or wherever you keep yours, and are read through the network whenever a node needs to reference it.
So with the option on you may get a delay at the begining as the zips of maps are sent out to each node, but the net traffic should be minimal after that.