We have a WSS 3.0 installation with Search Server, which is used to search for documents and save the search definition for repeated searches later. Users want the option to be able to download all the files in their search results as a one-time Zip file.
I have a very simple solution in which zipping files is performed in the web part when the user clicks on the button, but if the zip file takes some time to create the user, it remains to wait (and I suspect that any other users accessing the site will wait, because I think that document compression is performed by the w3wp process).
I thought that maybe I could start creating a zip file as a workflow and the user will be allowed to download the file after the workflow is complete, but now I realized that the workflows are also running in the w3wp process.
If a workflow task takes a lot of time (for example, if a user selects a large number of documents to upload), will this affect other users of the sharepoint site and stop their access to any pages until the workflow is complete?
Obviously, we are going to set a limit on the maximum size of documents that a user can secure for downloading, so that we do not kill the machine, but I'm still worried that no matter what size we put, the workflow process may still block other users . This is true? Are there any better suggestions for creating a task that doesn't affect other users?
thanks
Craig
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