Is there any way I can return a response from a restlet while continuing to execute code? I've got a situation where I receive a large amount of data to a restlet and I first validate the data quickly, if valid I'd like to return a successful message and continue to process the data.

There are a few async options in the N/task api. The restlet can start the async task and then return a response. Most likely you'll end up using a map/reduce script

Yeah I figured that would be the solution, I've had to do that before but I don't want to clog the queues up with unnecessary tasks.