It's not the default behaviour, but it's a perfectly good option when you have very frequent queries, like in your case. You are right, this will significantly improve the latency of your queries.
The only downside is if something wrong happens to the connection between the validation period background-validation-millis
. In this case, your query will fail, so, review your error handling code. I think it's a pretty cheap price to pay for the performance increase you might get.
Hope this helps.