One way to avoid the timeout would be to immediately send a results page to the browser. We cheat a bit. First generate a unique temporary page temp12345.htm where we will write our results when they become available. Next send a 307 Temporary Redirect header back to the browser that points to this temp12345.htm page. This temp page will then appear in the users browser window. Some text like: 

We are processing your job, please click refresh
now and again to see it your job is complete!

will inform the user of what is happening.

You are then free to process the job. All you then need to do is write the result to your temp12345.html page and then when the user next presses refresh - voila the result. No timeouts. Until the results are written the user just gets the same please wait page with each refresh.

For elegance you could add a meta refresh to refresh the page every 10 seconds or whatever, then the user does not even need to worry about the refresh. When you write the result you dump the auto refresh so the final page does not keep reloading.

merlyn explains the whole thing in detail (and with code) here

Hope this helps

tachyon

In reply to Re: Searching large files before browser timeout by tachyon
in thread Searching large files before browser timeout by aijin

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.