They key is that "something" is happening. Mario Kart online does this really well - the wait time between races is extremely long, but they switch between 4 sc

They key is that "something" is happening. Mario Kart online does this really well - the wait time between races is extremely long, but they switch between 4 screens and several throbbers while loading the race, so it feels snappier. Bing and Chrome do this well too - they paint as much of the UI as they can quickly, and load the heavier elements progressively. Are there parts of your page that you be rendered progressively as the data loads? Can you render the page first, and then load the data via AJAX?