The interesting thing about this whole thing is that once I forked it, and the process was able to complete (and mod_perl successfully cached the forked compilation) the script flew (10 seconds versus several minutes). This is important to note because originally I tried installing mod_perl and it actually hurt the performance of the script because not only was it trying to run my script but it was trying to cache the compilation (and thus added overhead). This makes me think it should be possible to run the script in the background, and create a web page to "jump" from one web page to the other -- i.e. through refresh or Javascript.

If you could make the transition nice enough I don't think the users would notice -- especially on the sped up version. Oh, one more thing, the reason I had to assign document.location = newURL; in javascript is because Mozilla choked on the refresh tags. I think it was caching it but didn't fiddle around with it enough to find out.