Apache keeping php waiting on output flush

Hi, Apologies if this is more of an Apache question than a php one, but as it's about the relationship between them, I thought it was safe to bring it up here ;) While investigating a possible performance issue, I discovered that (according to microtime()), my script runs 5 times faster for a local client i.e. telnet GET from the web host itself. I had expected that although the local GET would obviously be much faster than anything else overall, the php execution as reported by microtime() would be similar for any kind of client. I had mistakenly thought that Apache would handle buffering to the client, leaving php to get on with the rest of its script. It seems that when php flushes its output buffer it has to wait for Apache to actually send it to the browser client before the flush returns. Any thoughts/observations? George For the record the environment is : php/4.0.1pl2 Linux/2.0.36 Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6