Hi Kyle,
You are implementing auto update to the stream of activity:
forge.joomlapolis.com/issues/5281
Now if you have this feature in there, it would be "easy" to allow caching of the stream and simply updating the parts that are auto-updating. This could work just like websockets where the server is pushing out updates to the stream in real time to the users BUT ONLY TO THE STREAMS that have changed.
The rest could simply be saved in the user browser (or cache). That would speed up activity immensely as it would load the old version from cache imediatly and then differ the loading of the new ones.