We just ran into a problem with our cloud host - they've changed their apache settings to force a much shorter page timeout, and now during certain processes (report creation, etc.) that take more than 15 seconds (which the client is fine with; we're processing huge amounts of data) we get an error:

```
The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request POST /administrator/index.php.

Reason: Error reading from remote server

```

I have confirmed that our code is still running correctly in the background, and double-checked with the host that this is really just a timeout. Their suggestion was to create a progress bar that is associated with the backend code; that way apache knows something is still going on and won't time out.

I've done progress bars associated the page load events (i.e. when all images are loaded, etc.) but have no idea how to go about creating a progress bar associated with backend code. This is a Joomla site, coded in mvc php, and the code that's causing the issue is part of the model - the various pieces that could be involved are all doing humongous queries. The tables are indexed correctly and the queries are optimized; the issue is not how to make the processes take less time - because we're on a cloud server the timeout limit could be changed to 5 seconds tomorrow without any kind of warning. What I need is someone to point me in the right direction of how to create the progress bar so it's actually associated with the function being run in the model.

Any ideas? I'm a complete beginner as far as this goes.