"And your users will have a clue that the app is still alive!"

Great point. The one thing that I always keep in mind about performance and speed is that it's more the perception of speed that matters. Drew Speedie illustrated this perfectly in a conference of his I attended. He stood at the front telling jokes for 2.5 minutes and stopped. He then left the room for 1 minute and came back and asked which time frame was longer. Most people thought it was the latter.