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For an application I'm working on, we have to make a call to a database where everything is tallied up and then displayed to the user. The problem presents itself in load time. Currently, it takes about 8 minutes to get all of the data collected, counted, and sorted which is WAY too long.

Other team members are working on speeding it up, however if it isn't possible because of the sheer amount of data, we'll have to show the user that their data is loading, it's just taking a long time and they can come back soon.

What is the best way to do this? Should text appear after a certain amount of time telling the user what is happening? Currently, we have a loading spinner that looks like the one below (converted to png for UX.SE), but is that sufficient? I feel like the user would think the application stalled.

spinner

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Doing something like a progress bar or something that is actually updated rather than just animated lets the user still know the page is functioning correctly.

However if it is going to take ~8 minutes every time you load the page you are probably better off changing the delivery method to something like an email. This way the user can get on with whatever they want whilst this is processing, or if something happens like the application or their computer crashes, they don't lose 7:59 minutes worth of waiting.

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