28.7. Output Buffering
Output buffering is an advanced feature added in PHP 4. Enabling output buffering makes PHP direct the output of applications to a memory buffer instead of sending it directly to the client browser. Once in the buffer, applications can manipulate the output. This manipulation may be compression, conversion from XML to HTML, or even changing embedded URLs. Afterwards, the application emits the processed results to the browser.
Even if you have no need to perform postprocessing on the output your applications emit, output buffering can improve the performance of PHP-based Web sites by decreasing the number of I/O calls to the Web server's infrastructure. Calling the I/O layer of the Web server is typically an expensive operation. ...
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