1k buffer prevents proper display of dynamic content

Hi,

My apologies if this subject has been discussed before, or if the behaviour
I'm about to describe is by design, but the archive search doesn't appear to
be working at the moment.

I notice that Amaya, and at least one other browser (IE 5.5) seem to delay
rendering a new page until a certain number of bytes have been received.

If you have a dynamic page that outputs (streams?) small chunks of data at
intervals, it can take a very long time before you see anything.
As a nasty yet practical solution, I simply pad the page out to the required
size by putting useless junk into meta tags, and bingo, the page loads
instantly and I get to see the events rendered as they arrive.

At least one version of Netscape, and of Opera are able to render
immediately a page that is dynamically outputting small amounts of data. IE
5.5 only exhibits the delay when coming to the page from another page..
strangely it renders the events immediately if a refresh is done. So IE
behaves a little better than Amaya in this regard, also it's buffer appears
to be in the order of 300 - 400 bytes as opposed to a whopping 1k.

Anyway, it strikes me that unless you want to encourage people like me to do
ghastly things like padding headers to make these sorts of pages snappier -
then buffering so much data before rendering is something that should be
avoided.


Regards,

Julian

Received on Friday, 9 November 2001 04:58:20 UTC