I'm trying to produce a continuous client - server connection with PHP and FastCGI or FCGI. Its not working. I found a few items related to the subject I'll share here.
mod_fcgid has an OutputBuffer setting:
OutputBufferSize n (64k bytes) CGI output cache buffer size.
mod_fastcgi can be configured with the flush option, but it won't work for dynamic applications:
FastCGI application output is buffered by default. This is not the case for CGI scripts (under Apache 1.3). To override the default behavior, use the -flush option (not available for dynamic applications). Non-parsed header (nph-) scripts will be rejected by mod_fastcgi simply as warning the behavior is different (create a symbolic link to the script without the "nph-" prefix if this poses a problem).
Perhaps the "dynamic" factor is what prevented me from getting fcgid to work.
I was able to enable output buffering using libapache2-mod-fastcgi and the -flush setting. Here's my mod_fastcgi:
AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi .php FastCGIConfig -flush FastCgiIpcDir /var/lib/apache2/fastcgi
I also found an old note about PHP always buffering in FastCGI mode:
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=34429, but that appears to have been fixed a long time ago.
Darn. In my experience, trac.fcgi is way faster when run with mod_fcgid than mod_fastcgi. Oh well. At least there are options. And for whatever reason, I can't get OutputBufferSize to work at all.
Incredible! I searched and searched and searched... and finally found. Thanks to PAGE 4 of a search, this thread revealed that the problem was caused by mod_deflate buffering the output! I disabled the deflate module and the reduced and staggered output buffering worked fine. However, this even happened when I used compression in php.
Related cool stuff I found while figuring this out:
http://www.seaoffire.net/fcgi-faq.html
http://www.fastcgi.com/mod_fastcgi/docs/mod_fastcgi.html
http://trac.lighttpd.net/trac/wiki/Docs:ModFastCGI