Did a quick proof of concept to see if I could stream a zip file straight to a browser while it was being created.

The CGI script below is hard wired to create a zip file that contains the contents of two files, namely /tmp/file1 and /tmp/file2.

use IO::Compress::Zip qw(:all) ;

select STDOUT;
$| = 1;

my $OUT = \*STDOUT;               

print <<EOM;
Status: 200 OK
Content-Type: application/zip
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

EOM

my @files = qw(/tmp/file1 /tmp/file2) ;
zip [@files] => '-',
        FilterEnvelope => sub         
            { 
                # Chunk the output
                my $length = length($_);
                $_ = sprintf("%x", $length) . "\r\n" . $_ . "\r\n";
                $_ .= "\r\n" unless $length;
                1;
            }
        ;
[download]

Whether this helps in your use-case is depends on where the 10 minute delay comes from. If the delay is CPU/network related, this may help a bit, but it probably won't solve the issue for you.

Anyway, had created the code written, so thought I'd share it with you.