Anyone Using php flush For Server Optimization

[brandondrury]

I was reading about server optimization here: http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html and it mention the use of php_flush just after the </head> to get the ball rolling and at least get all external css loading (it's implied that the css files download load right way, I guess).

I was curious if anyone had tried it and if it conflicted with vBulletin in any way. I'm always a little cautious with this sort of thing with vBulletin.

Brandon

[kh99]

I don't know a lot about optimization or flushing output, but I don't think it could be done without restructuring things, since the vb pages are set up to output the entire page at the end of the script (which allows the censoring and gzip options to be done on the entire output). It might be interesting to try separating the headers from the page templates and output them at the beginning. But I think the ability for flush to actually send output also depends on the web server configuration, so you might go to all that trouble and find that it still doesn't do anything.

Also I think browser caching might make it so that the advantage you'd get from doing that would be small if any (after the first page load for a user).