Caching/buffering questions

Dolemite50

Hi,

phpinfo() on my host shows
output_buffering=no value
output_handler no value no value

I assume that means it isn't available. I tried using obstart() with a long query and it didn't give an error, but the benchmark was twice as slow. I would really like to compress my files and I'm unable to find a way to do some sort of gzip locally and then upload them,..is that possible? I read that some browsers won't support compression, but are they referring to on-the-fly or in general?

I'm also having no luck with caching. So far all of the tutorials and articles I've read about caching involved 3rd party server installs like Smarty. Isn't there a way to just have a cron run hourly and create a snapshot of the output to browser (like view source) and overwrite the existing php page? Or maybe have index.php start out with include('dynamic_content_houry'.php')..?

Thanks for any help.

Weedpacket

No, it just means you haven't set up anything special (as outlined on the [man]ob_start[/man] page).

If you want compression, have a look at the zlib output compression setting, or (assuming you're using Apache), the mod_gzip module.

But is bandwidth your bottleneck - are you producing a lot of output that can be compressed? If not, then output compression won't have much effect.

Dolemite50

Thank you Weedpacket.

I don't follow you on "not setting up something special"...? Does that mean it is installed but with default values or do I have to do something with the code itself?
I used this:
ob_start()
while...
echo"text<br>"
}
ob_end_flush()
..which I had pulled from the same link you gave me.

If it is installed, why would my benchmark be twice as slow? Low RAM on the server?

The output buffering I am attempting is for a nightly cron that dumps 10k records into another table. There's not really a major concern with how soon it finishes so I wasn't sure if I should do an insert low priority and let it chip away in the background or use OB and try to finish quickly. All of the tutes I read said OB was good for updating a lof of records at once (with LOCK TABLE) so I was heading in that direction.

As for the compression; I would say that I am outputting out a lot of data. Some pages have a lot of images and text; running a lot of queries on top of that. Hence my longing to just use hourly "snapshots" of certain pages. Would TIDY work for that?

Thanks again.