Echo 'string' while every long loop iteration (flush() not working)

From PHP Manual:

flush() may not be able to override the buffering scheme of your web server and it has no effect on any client-side buffering in the browser. It also doesn't affect PHP's userspace output buffering mechanism. This means you will have to call both ob_flush() and flush() to flush the ob output buffers if you are using those.

echo "Hello!";
flush();
ob_flush();

for($i = 0; $i < 10; $i ++) {
    echo $i;
    //5-10 sec execution time
    flush();
    ob_flush();
}

-or- you can flush and turn off Buffering

<?php
//Flush (send) the output buffer and turn off output buffering
while (ob_get_level() > 0)
    ob_end_flush();

echo "Hello!";

for($i = 0; $i < 10; $i ++) {
    echo $i . "\r\n";
}

?>

try this

while (@ob_end_flush());      
ob_implicit_flush(true);

echo "first line visible to the browser";
echo str_pad("",1024," ");
echo "<br />";

sleep(5);

echo "second line visible to the browser after 5 secs";

Just notice that this way you're actually disabling the output buffer for your current script. So if you're trying to 'ob_end_flush()' after that you'll get a warning that there is no buffer to close.

Make sure you first do:

@ini_set('zlib.output_compression', 0); @ini_set('implicit_flush', 1); @ob_end_clean();

and then just flush(); every time you need to output your echo'es to the browser.

In general, the desired behavior isn't possible is a deterministic/stable way using pure PHP and HTML.

If and how a browser renders a partial page depends on the browser, proxies and caches. Thus, even if the stuff works on your test machine, it's likely, that it does not on your production system.

The library xAjax provides a well-integrated solution to manage AJAX style updates with PHP. While xAjax might be dead as a project (at least right now), it still works fine.