What does exactly the value of output_buffering ini variable mean in php.ini?
On our older server, it was set to 1
output_buffering = 1
With this setting, I could call
ob_clean();and it worked like a charm. However, we moved our system to a new server where the output buffering was set to 4096:
output_buffering = 4096
With this, calling ob_clean(); did not have any effect, until I explicitly started the very beginning of my code with ob_start(); (It seems that on the other server with output_buffering=1 it was called implicitly).
output_buffering boolean/integer
You can enable output buffering for all files by setting this directive to 'On'. If you wish to limit the size of the buffer to a certain size - you can use a maximum number of bytes instead of 'On', as a value for this directive (e.g., output_buffering=4096). This directive is always Off in PHP-CLI.
From the PHP Manual
What this means is :
0 is false/off so output buffering is disabled.1 is true/on so that output buffering is enabled and has no set limit (at least in this scope) to the maxmum buffer size.>1 is the maximum number of bytes for a custom output buffer size.Therefore, choices above in the PHP.ini config are:
output_buffering= 0 / 1 / 1+