PHP Flush() Not Working in Chrome

php flush not working

You're using ob_flush without ob_start, so there is nothing to flush for it.

It also depends on the webserver and proxy and its settings.

You should disable buffering for Nginx (add proxy_buffering off; to the config file and restart Nginx)

Also, check if your php.ini contains output_buffering = Off and zlib.output_compression = Off.

How to flush data to browser but continue executing

ob_flush writes the buffer. In other words, ob_flush tells PHP to give Apache (or nginx/lighttpd/whatever) the output and then for PHP to forget about it. Once Apache has the output, it does whatever it wants with it. (In other words, after ob_flush it's out of your control whether or not it gets immediately written to the browser).

So, short answer: There's no guaranteed way to do that.

Just a guess, you're likely looking for AJAX. Whenever people are trying to manipulate when page content loads as you're doing, AJAX is almost always the correct path.

If you want to continue a task in the background, you can use ignore_user_abort, as detailed here, however, that is often not the optimal approach. You essentially lose control over that thread, and in my opinion, a web server thread is not where heavy processing belongs.

I would try to extract it out of the web facing stuff. This could mean a cron entry or just spawning a background process from inside of PHP (a process that though started from inside of script execution will not die with the script, and the script will not wait for it to finish before dying).

If you do go that route, it will mean that you can even make some kind of status system if necessary. Then you could monitor the execution and give the user periodic updates on the progress. (Technically you could make a status system with a ignore_user_abort-ed script too, but it doesn't seem as clean to me.)

ob_implicit_flush(), flush(), ob_flush() - not working on remote server

I didn't take into account nginx, which has it's own output buffer.

I simply added 'header("X-Accel-Buffering: no");' to the top of the php script and it all works fine now.

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