Posted by Richard Lynch on 05/09/05 06:43

On Sun, May 8, 2005 6:02 pm, Rory Browne said:
> Bare in mind that some browsers don't display data either until they
> have received a certain amount, or have closed the connection AFAIK.

Actually...

First, the web server may well have some kind of buffering going on,
though current Apache/PHP play well together to allow flush() to flush(),
I do believe. Older versions of Apache/PHP, not so much, as I recall.

Next, there could be other buffers involved, over which you have no control.

Squid, for example, could conceivably be configured/designed to buffer
some data. (I have no idea if it *does* but it *could* have been designed
to do so)

Finally, many browsers will not display things like TABLE tags until they
have all the TABLE so they know how to lay it out to give enough column
space to each element.

So your HTML can drastically affect the user's perception of how fast a
slow process works.

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