An alternate if you have some long processing that can continue without any further feedback to the user after sending "Thanks for your submission" is to fork a process to the long processing and close all of the STDIO handles in that process - in that way the main process will end and the server close the connection to the browser but you can continue processing:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
                                                                      
+          
use CGI qw(:standard);
                                                                      
+          
local $| = 1;
                                                                      
+          
print header("text/plain"), "this is a test";
                                                                      
+          
if (!fork )
{
   close STDOUT;
   close STDIN;
   close STDERR;
                                                                      
+          
   # some long running processing ...

   for ( 1 ... 1000 )
   {
      sleep 1;
   }
}
[download]

Of course if you are getting a lot of hits and your processing is taking a very long time, you may will find yourself getting complaints from the administrator of the server.

/J\