“CAUTION: provisional headers are shown” in Chrome debugger

Question

I noticed a strange caution message when looking at downloaded resources using Google chrome inspector (F12):

Caution provisional headers a

Answer 1

I've had this come up very recently (today in fact) where I've had an AJAX call go out to the server and Chrome fires off the "Caution: Provisional headers are shown." In the server side PHP scripting, there are MySQL queries that can be pretty much instant or take a few seconds depending on the given scenario. My server response isn't sent back to the browser until the queries are completed. I've found I get this error only when time consuming queries (up to a few seconds total) are being done and prevent the response from being sent back.

My scenario involves the very rare possibility of having to alter a table by adding/removing hundreds of columns for weather model output...hence the response lag from iterating through a loop of ALTER TABLE queries.