It would be great if PHP had an option which would buffer the response to the client, so that it could add a Content-Length header to enable persistent connections with HTTP/1.0 clients.

This could be done automagically, or there could just be an option to buffer the output of the script and make it available to a function which is called before sending to the client (so that things like compression could be done as well).

(I looked for a way to do this by importing a library, etc, but I don't see anything that would make it possible; if there is such a thing, a pointer would be much appreciated).

Note that IIS5 buffers ASP responses by default now; in 4, they could be turned on by setting a flag in the top of the script (forget what it is now)