RFC: suggested feature

[Christian Vogler <cvogler@gradient.cis.upenn.edu>]

It occurred to me today that there might be yet another way to
decrease the response time of webglimpse. As of now, webglimpse waits
until the glimpse process has completed before it processes the
results and formats them as HTML.

I suggest an experiment: Why don't we try to read and format the
output of glimpse through the pipe as it arrives? Although this would
not cut total search times, the user would see a partial response much
sooner. If the search result is in the first few matches, he or she
wouldn't even have to wait for the search to complete before he or she
can continue.

Technically, this would mean that we'd need to create a pipe in
webglimpse, then call fork(), redirect standard input, ouput, and
error to the pipe and call glimpse via exec(). The processing loop
after the glimpse call would also need to be modified a bit. 

I'm willing to experiment with this early next year. This looks like a
major change, but it would be very worthwhile, methinks. It will
interfere with ResultCache.pm, but this module needs to be rewritten
anyway. Maybe we can combine this rewrite with my proposed change.

Any comments?  

- Christian