Question

I’m trying find a way to have PHP to indicate to the browser that all page output is complete. After the page is done we’re running some statistics code that usually doesn’t take to long but in case it does I don’t want to have the users browser waiting for more data. This can’t be done via JavaScript because it needs to work with mobile phones.

I’m already starting output buffering using

mb_http_output("UTF8"); 
ob_start("mb_output_handler");

to insure I don’t have issues with my sites MB text (Japanese). I was hoping that ob_end_flush() would do the trick but if I place sleep(10); after the ob_end_flush() the browser waits an additional 10 seconds. Does anyone have any ideas about this?

UPDATE:
Using jitters approach below I “ob_gzhandler” to get it working with gzip any one see any possible issues here?

//may be also add headers for cache-control and expires (IE)
header("Connection: close"); //tells browser that connection will be closed
ob_start();
ob_start("ob_gzhandler");
//page content
ob_end_flush();
$size = ob_get_length();
header("Content-Length: $size");
ob_end_flush();
flush();

UPDATE AGAIN:

Please take another look at the code above. You need to do an ob_start(); before the ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”); and then call ob_end_flush(); prior to calling ob_get_length() so that you get the correct gzip compressed size.

Answer 1

Use something along these lines

//may be also add headers for cache-control and expires (IE)
header("Connection: close"); //tells browser that connection will be closed
ob_start();
//generate your output
$size = ob_get_length();
header("Content-Length: $size");
ob_end_flush();
flush();
//continue statistic processing