New from the SitePoint blog, there's an article from Craig Buckler about using buffer flushing to increase the load times of your applications and websites.

Output buffering makes this process quicker and more efficient. The buffer is essentially a big memory-resident string. When text is output, it's appended to the buffer rather than returned to the browser immediately. The buffer is then "flushed", i.e. its contents are transmitted and the string is reset pending further output.

He notes the instances where the buffer would be flushed - end of page, exceeds number of bytes allowed or a manual flush is called - and code snippet example of a simple flushing setup. He also asks for some feedback on this method, so be sure to look at the comments for more thoughts from the community.