cgi buffering

Caesura has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello again,

I have an odd problem, related to the "server push" one I had earlier.

I have an apache 2 webserver with two cgi-bin/ directories, both configured the same (as far as I can see in conf/httpd.conf).

There is the same Perl CGI program in each of them, printing out HTML on the fly to a Firefox 3 web browser in two tabs.

One of them prints the HTML out as it goes, the other waits for the webpage to finish before printing. This is my test code in each of the cgi-bin/ directories :

#!/usr/bin/perl 
# $Header$

use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard);

# No buffering of output to browser.
#
$|++;

print header;

print qq {
<HTML>
   <HEAD>
      <META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=wind
+ows-1252">
      <META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="vi">
      <TITLE>the Title</TITLE>
   </HEAD>
<BODY>
};

print "Starting ...<br>\n";
for (my $i=0; $i < 10; $i++) {
   print "$i<br>\n";
   sleep 1;
}
print "</BODY></HTML>";
exit;
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In one tab the text is printed as it goes, the other it waits.

Is there anyone who can tell me where to look for any Perl/Apache config changes between the two cgi-bin/ directories? It all seems most odd to me! I don't think we use mod_perl, so that's not the thing. Printing @INC and perl -V in each of the cgi-bin progs yeilds the same results.

One thing - one of the cgi-bin dirs has an .htaccess file in the dir above cgi-bin, and the other doesn't. Would this affect the buffering behaviour?

AuthUserFile /the_root/dir_one/security/security.pwd
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName EnterPassword
Authtype Basic

require valid-user
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Any pointers would be useful, I'm sure its obvious, but I can't put my finger on why these things are different, running the same perl file.

Thanks in advance!

Caesura

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