To spawn or not to spawn? This is the question...

[The Saltydog <thesaltydog gmail com>]

I have an application that performs deep directory recurrent scanning.
During such scan, at each iteration, I execute   while
(gtk_events_pending()) { gtk_main_iteration(); }        in order to keep the
GUI updated from the directory scans results. It works fine, at an
acceptable speed.

Now my question: is it worth, in terms of application speed, to spawn
the reccurrent iteration and get the data thru a pipe, instead of
directly sending the data to the display routine?