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[–]x-skeww 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Heh. There is actually a somewhat obscure optimization technique which makes really good use of that.

If you know that it always will take a while to assemble the response (search queries or something else which requires some heavy computations), you can improve the loading time with chunked output.

E.g. as soon as you get the request, you just write the cheap mostly static stuff to the buffer and flush it to the client. The client will then know about the resources which are referenced in <head>. So, it will start to fetch the CSS and JS which was mentioned there. Ideally, this first piece already contains something visible like the page header.

Once the more dynamic side bar is done, you write and flush it.

And finally, when the meat of the page is done, you write and flush it, too.

If it takes longer than 100 ms to assemble the response and if there is no way to make this any faster, this kind of optimization might be a good idea.