flush vs. sleep

Hello, the problem is that flush sometimes does not work if it is followd by a sleep e.g [example 1]: print"Hello World"; flush(); sleep(5); displays nothing until the 5 seconds are over! The main target is to do a loop to get data out of a database to run a chat. Here is the main function [example 2]: $result_show=mysql_query("select author, message from chat where message_id > '$last_msg'"); $row_show=mysql_num_rows($result_show); function chat_loop($last_msg) { while ($row_show = mysql_fetch_row($result_show)) { print"$row_show[1]: $row_show[2]<br>"; flush(); $last_msg = $row_show[0]; }; sleep(2); chat_loop($last_msg); }; The strange thing is that it sometimes example 1 works. But only if NOT running in a frame. Using IE5, Apache, PHP3 Any suggestions, mikx P.S. i can not drop the sleep --> stack overflow :-\