Want to thank everyone for their ideas and warnings. I'm going to try and implement this with the threads as mentioned by BrowserUk. I do have some concerns though regarding error situations, and what kind of curveballs Windows will throw at me. Most of my coding is on FreeBSD, and so I cringe anytime I have to write code for the Win32 platform.

I guess we will see what happens.

Also, I figured I'd mention that my "long_running_function()" is using OLE to launch an external application (Quickbooks to be exact), and is performing a query to Quickbooks that can take up to an hour to return a response. (And this is on reasonably high end hardware btw) I'm trying to work with the client to redesign a couple of things to break up this Quickbooks query into several smaller queries, but the client isn't wanting to break the query up yet.

In reply to Re: How to break up a long running process by markh
in thread How to break up a long running process by markh

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.