To me this is interesting also in that I have been plagued with a browser closing before a long log file was displayed as running output of a C++ process in unix. Thought I had tried keep-alive correctly (as an header in the html page..) and the only answer I could find would be to use a meta refresh which would reload the page periodically.

So what I have is a perl program called as cgi, which does a lot of processing and calls various C/C++ programs, while it and those process write a detailed log file, and simultaneously the cgi program writes a much more terse description of what is going on to the user's browser. The terseness of the cgi output would cause a browser timeout, and the user would think the C process died and try to launch it again from cgi. (Ouch.)

This causes problems of course, what if it takes longer to load the page than the meta refresh period? (disappears while you are trying to read it, is what happens).

I wonder if writing a Content-Length header with a huge number would keep the browser open indefinitely (i.e. the browser logo would keep spinning forever)?