Re: tlug: HTTP headers q

[Adrian Havill <havill@example.com>]

On Thu, 17 Feb 2000, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>   As of Apache 1.3, CGI scripts are essentially not buffered.  Every time
>   your script does a "flush" to output data, that data gets relayed on to
>   the client.  Some scripting languages, for example Perl, have their own
> 
> I think that's the interesting sense of "unbuffered."  I'm not sure
> how Apache would handle (eg) a partial header, whether it would stash
> it until it was complete, then send it on, or whether it would stash
> headers until all the stashed headers in the block were complete.  But
> that probably doesn't matter.

Poorly written FAQ answer it seems. "not buffered", then in the next
sentence an example using "flush"? Perhaps the word "essentially" here
means "a buffer small enough so that you probably won't notice it."

I think what they're trying to say here is that prior to 1.3, requests to
flush the buffer were ignored by Apache (or they're saying that flushing
was mandatory for non nph-, and  now flushing may be necessary for nph- as
well-- not sure-- I haven't touched a CGI running on 1.2 since Jonathan
and I were at Threeweb) and it flushed when it was good and ready-- one
way to get around it was to use nph-. In 1.3, the output is still
buffered. The difference is that Apache 1.3 honors buffer flush requests
from the CGI program.

And as you hinted, this probably only counts once you've outputted your
headers and the blank line indicating the beginning of content... as the
CGI interface can't really do anything with a partial header.

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