Pattern to manage heavy operations

[maqjav]

Hello.

I'm planning on writing a piece of code that will process a lot of information and I'm afraid that this will freeze the users client. How can I avoid this situation?

Let's put it in an example:

local chunkSize = 100

function getNextChunk(currentPosition)
     -- return next chunk from huge table.
end

function processItem(data)
    -- Data is also a big table that will require several operations
end

function doIt(currentPosition, callback) 
    local nextChunk = getNextChunk(currentposition)
    if (not nextChunk) then
         return
    end

    local currentIndex = -1
    for id, data in pairs (nextChunk) do
        currentIndex = currentIndex + 1

        -- continue next chunk
        if (currentIndex ~= chunkSize) then
             callback(processItem(data))
        else
             -- process next chunk after sometime, using an async timer or OnUpdate?
             -- this is the part I'm missing
             return
        end
    end
end

Or perhaps instead of processing the table by chunks use a ticker or something like that and process 1 by 1?

Thanks!