I am writing a php script and somewhere before my header() function i have printed text to the browser hereby causing my header() function give me a well known error:
Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent.
Now my question is, I have the intentions of using ob_start() and ob_flush() before and after the header() function. But I once heard something like output buffer can affect the performance of one's application negatively. How true is that?
Or should I just stick with the idea of printing Javascript function to redirect the page.
Thanks for your time.
Using an output buffer requires the server to store the entire output of the PHP in RAM, so if it's a large page, you'll wind up using a fair amount of memory - and the server will also have to wait until the entire page is generated before sending it out, which could cause a small delay. But other than that, I don't think there's much of a disadvantage in using an output buffer. For what you want to do, it's certainly a reasonable solution.