making the output appear faster on the client browser

Question

When I process large records in a while loop and each iteration of the loop outputs some info for the screen, I always find myself looking at an old screen. All I see is the activity icon spinning - which indicates that the server is processing some data.

I'm not running into timeout issues cause I already got the set_time_limit (3600); at the top of the script. It's just the boring screen that worries me.

In ASP ( where I came from), I go response.flush and that takes care of the problem. By the way, in ASP, I always turn the buffering on with response.buffer=true. In PHP, this is a highly debatable area, I still do not get a clear view whether ob should be turned on or off.

Here, I'm not turning on the ob_start buffering, the question is why isn't echo push the content to the browser?

What do you do to make the browser progressively gets the html chunks as the while loop in the server processes information?

Why not ob_start and then just call [ob_flush](http://php.net/manual/en/function.ob-flush.php) regularly in your loop — Anigel, May 03 '12 at 18:44

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 03 '12 at 19:04

0

disable output buffering, reduce the buffer size in your php.ini, use implicit flush or explicitly flush using flush(). But if you have to display a large amount of data its maybe a better idea to paginate your content or use a command line script when processing takes too much time.

answered May 03 '12 at 19:04

MonkeyMonkey

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as to the "reducing the buffer size in your php.ini", I rather not touch the php.ini. Can that be done at page level? – Average Joe May 03 '12 at 19:19
almost any value in php.ini can be modified in your current script by the ini_set function. – StackOverflowed Oct 24 '12 at 15:30

making the output appear faster on the client browser

1 Answers1