Indication of process progress

I was migrating an OpenVZ container today which had TONS of mailqueue files and I mean tons. This slowed down the tarring process significantly, almost to the point where I thought the process had hung for some reason, until I investigated.

Could you implement something for all processes which potentially could take some time to show that at least progress is being made and even perhaps give in indication as to how far through it is or an estimated time of completion?

That would be great.