Using turbolinks in Rails, if a request is taking a long time, either expectedly or not, the browser does not have the usual cues to show that anything is happening at all.
I have created a gist which works around this issue using a loading dialog which automatically pops up if the request is taking more than 500ms, which is configurable.
https://gist.github.com/cpuguy83/5016442
@PageSpinner =
spin: (ms=500)->
@spinner = setTimeout( (=> @add_spinner()), ms)
$(document).on 'page:change', =>
@remove_spinner()
spinner_html: '
<div class="modal hide fade" id="page-spinner">
<div class="modal-head card-title">Please Wait...</div>
<div class="modal-body card-body">
<i class="icon-spinner icon-spin icon-2x"></i>
 Loading...
</div>
</div>
'
spinner: null
add_spinner: ->
$('body').append(@spinner_html)
$('body div#page-spinner').modal()
remove_spinner: ->
clearTimeout(@spinner)
$('div#page-spinner').modal('hide')
$('div#page-spinner').on 'hidden', ->
$(this).remove()
$(document).on 'page:fetch', ->
PageSpinner.spin()