Optimizing - Large Db Result Set

when creating a webpage that must display a large result set, the page load time is unbearable. Unfortunately, there are a lot of records and they all need to be displayed, at once, on this one page.

To reduce file size, I have minimized the amount of HTML tags used to dislay these records. My only other idea is to write javascript matrix to hold the data, and then to use dom to create the page on the client side. Are there any tried and true ways of speeding up page loads?