The general problem you're facing is that of returning a response (in the form of an HTML page) to the user while work continues on the server side.

There are a couple of strategies for this. merlyn points to one of them, which is to have the CGI fork, and continue work in the child process while the parent process exits. Works great on Unix systems, works very poorly on Win32 (IIS).

Another approach is to write a separate server process to handle work requests. The CGI queues up a request to this new worker process, either by dropping a file into a well-known directory, or by opening a socket to it and pushing the request along. The CGI pushs and HTML page back to the browser and exits, while the worker process grinds through requests.

This latter approach works well when you have control of the server. Some ISPs forbid running your own server processes.

In reply to Re: Ensuring the user doesn't have to wait for a CGI to finish by dws
in thread Ensuring the user doesn't have to wait for a CGI to finish by neilwatson

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.