What is the preferred way of checking a list of products for discounts in Commerce Server?

Question

I have a page that shows a list of Commerce Server products (sometimes dozens) that are in a given category. I need to make my page conditional so that it displays a different graphic next to the product thumbnail, that indicates which products within a given CS product list have discounts that apply. My question is what is the best way to do this? Below are two initial thoughts I had as potential ways to accomplish this.

1. Create a crawler application that runs the basket pipeline on every product and pre-stores if discounts apply in a table that is easily queryable.

2. Create a temporary cart and add every product that is going to be displayed for the CS category and run the basket pipline on this temp cart. I'm not sure how well this would work if you had a lot of products like 50-100, would this be slow?