sockets - fine tunning

I'm trying to make an application using XML-RPC, and I have the following problem: I use fsockopen() to simulate a POST to my local web-server. All goes very well except it's very very slow. Here is my code maybe someone could tell me what I'm doing wrong: ===================================== $url= parse_url($this->serverURL); $requestString= "POST ".$url['path']." HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: ".$url['host']."\r\nContent-type: application/x-www.form-urlencoded\r\nContent-length: ".strlen($this->requestData)."\r\n\r\n".$this->requestData;; $fp = fsockopen($url['host'], 80, $err_num, $err_msg, 5); if ($fp) { //make the request to the xml-rpc server fputs($fp, $requestString); //gets the result while (!feof($fp)) { $response .= fgets($fp, 1024); } fclose($fp); $this->rawResponse=$response; $this->error=false; } else { $this->error=true; $this->errorMessage=$err_msg; } ==================================== This is the slowest part of my script(about 16 seconds). The server's execution time is only 0.00064206123352051 seconds. I don't know why it takes so much to write a string to the socket and then to read the response. Here are the execution times: Server Start Server Stop 1067090777.5339 1067090777.5346 Client Start Client Stop 1067090777.5303 1067090794.5286 If someone knows a way on how to speed this up please tell me how to do it. Thank you for your time -- Cosmin <cosminb@as.ro>