In this recent post to his blog Michael Caplan looks at a feature of PHP that's sometimes forgotten when pushing out larger chunks of data - flushing.

As a recluse who prefers hiding behind servers rather than dancing around your web browser’s canvas, I was intrigued with their server side recommendations - however sparse they may be. In particular, flushing generated head content early to speed up overall page delivery and rending time was a technique new to me.

Michael looks at what "flushing generated head content" means and includes a scenario - pulling the top palettes from the COLOURlovers site - and some performance stats on page load time and response time directly from the server (complete with graphs).