Well, cron jobs can run at any interval.. once a minute, once an hour, once a month... You just make the best choice for the application.

There is still no good reason for a CGI script to run for 1 hour. Leaving a browser window tied up for that long is a Bad Idea, especially when a browser timeout will stop this lengthy report from running.

The process could maybe be started through a CGI script, forked off, and then e-mail the user when it is complete. But, it shouldn't sit there running.

TMTOWTDI, but a 1 hour CGI script is the wrong way.