In a recent post to his site Jeff Geerling shows you how to disable the output buffering that PHP includes and create "streaming PHP" code similar to Drupal's recently introduced BigPipe handling.

For the past few days, I've been diving deep into testing Drupal 8's experimental new BigPipe feature, which allows Drupal page requests for authenticated users to be streamed and loaded in stages—cached elements (usually the majority of a page) are loaded almost immediately, meaning the end user can interact with the main elements on the page very quickly, then other uncacheable elements are loaded in as Drupal is able to render them.

[...] BigPipe takes advantage of streaming PHP responses (using flush() to flush the output buffer at various times during a page load), but to ensure the stream is delivered all the way from PHP through to the client, you need to make sure your entire webserver and proxying stack streams the request directly, with no buffering.

He decided to try out different configurations to see if he could reproduce the same thing outside of Drupal and - good news, everyone - he found a reliable way. He starts with a basic procedural script that emulates BigPipe and calls a flush inside a loop to push the latest output to the waiting client. While this cooperates on the command line the browser doesn't cooperate the same way. A small tweak helps it work, so he shows how to reproduce this reliably across the full stack - Nginx, Apache and Varnish.

He ends with a quick warning for those using VMWare/VirtualBox about some oddness he experienced in buffering the responses and includes a way to test if it's your script or the VM causing the trouble.

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.

On PHPBuilder.com there's a new article with a few things - six things, to be exact - that you might not know about the PHP language as written up by Chris Roane.

Over the years I've come across some useful tricks in PHP that are not obvious, but are worth mentioning. This is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all the useful tricks that you can do with PHP.

The list of six includes:

• Count Characters in a String
• Use Single Quotes When Possible
• Use Arrays in Form Fields
• PHP Output Buffering

DevShed has posted the second article in their series looking at benchmarking your PHP scripts. This time they look at the use of "timers" to check on script execution length.

Since you already know how to create timer functions and classes, in this tutorial, I'll create some concrete examples that show where these timing mechanisms can be applied in order to evaluate the performance of certain PHP applications.

They create a few classes that connect to a database and pull out rows (handing it off to a Result class). They use these classes in two examples - one with compression (output buffering) and one without using their Timer class to evaluate the differences.

Arnold Daniels has a quick little tutorial posted to his blog about using the output handler in PHP (one of what he considers a technique that's "missing out" from normal PHP use). His example involves buffering the common page parts - like a template.

A website usually has a part which is common across all pages, containing the HTML header, the menu and those kinds of things. This is often solved in one of four ways. [...] All of these methods work, however there is a better way to solve this. You guessed it, by using an output handler.

He links to an example he's created and includes the code for his OutputHandler class to make controlling the content easier.

Arnold Daniels has a quick little tutorial posted to his blog about using the output handler in PHP (one of what he considers a technique that's "missing out" from normal PHP use). His example involves buffering the common page parts - like a template.

A website usually has a part which is common across all pages, containing the HTML header, the menu and those kinds of things. This is often solved in one of four ways. [...] All of these methods work, however there is a better way to solve this. You guessed it, by using an output handler.

He links to an example he's created and includes the code for his OutputHandler class to make controlling the content easier.

A new post on the LooPo blog points out a handy PHP library to make and work with PDF files in PHP - Portable Document Markup Language (PDML).

I was curious how this works, as it seemed pretty different from previous similar libraries (PDFLib, FPDF), that offered a programmatic API to generate PDF DOMs instead of a markup language.

They describe how it works, what's included with the download and how it uses output buffering to get the job done as well as a few updates and further tips on its usage.

A new post on the LooPo blog points out a handy PHP library to make and work with PDF files in PHP - Portable Document Markup Language (PDML).

I was curious how this works, as it seemed pretty different from previous similar libraries (PDFLib, FPDF), that offered a programmatic API to generate PDF DOMs instead of a markup language.

They describe how it works, what's included with the download and how it uses output buffering to get the job done as well as a few updates and further tips on its usage.

PHP-GTKers working in English-related applications, don't have a problem with debugging messages output to a console when debugging, but applications on a more international front have issues with their output. But help has been found in this new post on the Riff Blog - a method for correctly encoding PHP-GTK applications.

PHP scripts are typically stored under UTF-8 encoding to limit i18n headaches, while the console in which their output will be displayed is normally configured to some regional encoding, like IBM850 in Windows/XP French.

So we need a workaround...

He splits the process out into a few steps, each with its own explanation and code:

• Builtin tools
• Buffering
• Flushing
• PHP-GTK is not PHP for the Web
• Auto-flushing

All wrapped up with a final solution - using the iconv functionality in combination with some output buffering to correctly display the message.

PHP-GTKers working in English-related applications, don't have a problem with debugging messages output to a console when debugging, but applications on a more international front have issues with their output. But help has been found in this new post on the Riff Blog - a method for correctly encoding PHP-GTK applications.

PHP scripts are typically stored under UTF-8 encoding to limit i18n headaches, while the console in which their output will be displayed is normally configured to some regional encoding, like IBM850 in Windows/XP French.

So we need a workaround...

He splits the process out into a few steps, each with its own explanation and code:

• Builtin tools
• Buffering
• Flushing
• PHP-GTK is not PHP for the Web
• Auto-flushing

All wrapped up with a final solution - using the iconv functionality in combination with some output buffering to correctly display the message.