echo messages not displaying until after all DB inserts are complete

[mrtwice]

I have a page that I am reading info from a DB file and then writing that said info into a MSSQL DB. During the process, there are various user messages that I echo out to the screen. Unfortunately, none of the messages appear until the whole page is processed. This leaves the user sitting for about 10 minutes with no status updates, then BANG, all messages output and the page is complete.

Any ideas?

[AstroTeg]

I believe you have a buffering issue. By default PHP caches the page and when the page is done, it gets sent to the browser. You can force PHP to dump its contents early by using [man]ob_start[/man], [man]ob_flush[/man] (I'm not able to get out to php's docs to verify this). You'd need ob_start at the beginning of your page. Then probably after each major you do, do an ob_flush. Life sounds good? Well, the browser has its cache. And this you don't really have much control over. Basically, the browser caches the screen output and when it determines its cache is full, it will dump its contents to the screen. But you should be ok. Experiment and see how it goes...

[mrtwice]

Thank you for the suggestion, I will try it and let you know how it goes.