I like the suggestion by clive, but I'd modify it slightly. You've got a database so why not get the result from that. Have a cgi script with 2 params, total and begin, total has the number of records we are going to put in the table and begin is how many there was before we started.

/status.cgi?total=296390&begin=245

select count(*) from table

printf "%d of %d records inserted", $count - param('begin'), param('total');

-- Gavin