Improve performance/lag for benefit of frontend

[vincerubinetti]

Performance of the frontend can be a bit laggy, which makes it unpredictable and confusing to the user when there is a queue of long computations in sequence. Some of this lag can be improved on the frontend, which I am in the process of doing. Some of this lag can surely be improved with modifications to the backend.

I'm not sure what the improvements would look like. One could possibly be a timeout parameter available for each query. After taking too long, it would simply give up on the query and return an error or something, preventing too many queries from building up and "clogging" the backend.

This is something we should discuss and iterate on over time.