Re: Disadvantages of output buffering

On 26/06/07, Robert Cummings <robert@interjinn.com> wrote:

On Tue, 2007-06-26 at 14:09 +0100, Stut wrote: Robert Cummings wrote:

On Tue, 2007-06-26 at 14:33 +0200, Emil Edeholt wrote:

Hi! My php project would get a much cleaner code if I could set cookies anywhere in the code. So I thought of output buffering. But I can't find any articles on the cons of output buffering. I mean it most be a reason for it being off by default?

Cons of output buffering:

    - teeeeeeeency weency time overhead

Compared to the time taken to flush to the client more often? This is incorrect in most cases, and even when it's not it really really is "teeeeeeeency weency".

    - memory overhead since buffered content remains in memory
      until flushed.

Indeed, but memory is cheap and you're likely to run out of memory for other reasons waaaaay before output buffering causes it. Agreed, I was hard pressed to come up with cons in the first place :)

Modern browsers often start partially rendering HTML as soon as it arrives rather than waiting for the page to load completely. Obviously, if you're waiting until the end of the script before actually sending any HTML, they can't do that so your page might appear less responsive. -robin