These options are set from the Other tab of the Options Manager interface.

If you are unfortunate to be hosted on a web server where an arbitrary limitation is placed on the amount of resources (CPU cycles and/or memory) that CGI scripts can be used, you can change these settings. Selecting a "more strict" setting causes Discus to break its operations into smaller but more frequent "chunks" when performing an option such as indexing or regenerating (when you see a gauge).

If you know that your server does not limit your resource usage, you can select a less strict setting to make gauge screens perform larger "chunks" of processing, which speeds up these gauged screens.

Unless you know exactly what you're doing, leave these settings alone.