Prevent output buffering with PHP and Apache

Question

I have a PHP script which sends a large number of records, and I want to flush each record as soon as it is available: the client is able to process each record as it arrive

Answer 1

The only solution that worked for me was to set the output_buffering directive in php.ini to "Off". I didn't want to do this for the entire server, just this one specific resource. Normally you could use ini_set from the PHP script, but for whatever reason php doesn't allow output_buffering to be set in this way (see the php manual).

Well it turns out that if you're using Apache, you can set some php ini directives (including output_buffering) from your server config, including a .htaccess file. So I used the following in a .htaccess file to disable the output_buffering just for that one file:

    php_value output_buffering Off

And then in my static server configuration, I just needed AllowOverride Options=php_value (or a larger hammer, like AllowOverride All) in order for that to be allowed in a .htaccess file.