CiviCRM Dashboard Hangs for 5+ minutes
https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-16035 has now been fixed. So your best solution now would be to upgrade to CiviCRM 4.7.11 which will include an improved dashboard that no longer depends on server-to-self http requests.

This upgrade will be released in about 2 weeks. The new dashboard features are sponsored by WMF.

Read more about the issue at https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-17663