The SitePoint PHP blog has a new performance-related post to the site today from Imran Latif. This new post looks at effective use of output buffering and streaming and explains how it works and some examples of its use.

As a PHP developer, I was wondering whether we can have something similar [to Streaming in Rails] in our favorite language? The answer is yes – we can easily have streaming in PHP applications with little effort, but in order to get this right we have to become familiar with some underlying concepts. In this article, we will see what streaming is, what output_buffering is and how to get our desired result under different webservers (Apache, Nginx) and PHP configurations (CGI, mod_php, FastCGI).

He starts off with a comparison of the two different methods, streaming and output buffering, and how they behave in the output of content. He then gets into some simple examples with PHP with various methods: a simple delay, chunking up output and finally using the actual output buffering handling PHP offers. He also includes an example of streaming content over an Ajax request with a simple test using the sleep function.