Socket takes a long time to 'finish'

Hello, I have a small but somewhat annoying issue. Whenever I open a socket to another server, the file is read very quickly, but it takes the up to 30 seconds or so to close the connection... Here is what I do: $sever = "server.mit.edu"; $url = "/link"; $port = 80; $user_agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']; $server_protocol = $_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL']; $valsencoded = ""; while (list($key,$value) = each ($content))

     $valsencoded .= urlencode($key) . "=" . urlencode($value) ."&";

$valsencoded = substr($urlencoded,0,-1); $content_length = strlen($valsencoded); $headers = "POST $url $server_protocol Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Host: $server Content-Length: $content_length "; // open socket $socket = fsockopen($server, $port, $errno, $errstr, 60.0); if (!$socket) {

    $error = "ERROR: cannot contact Mailman server";
    return array(false,$error,$error); }

if ($errstr) {

    $error = "ERROR: fSockOpen Error ($errno): $errstr";
    return array(false,$error,$error); }

fputs($socket, $headers); // send headers fputs($socket, $urlencoded); // send post data // "tried stream_set_timeout($socket,3)" here // get the returned page while (!feof($socket)) {

    $buf = @fgets($socket, 2048);
    $htmlreturned .= $buf;

} fclose($socket); If I put a debug 'echo "BUF: $buf\n" inside the while loop, I see the returned html from the post show up pretty much immediately, within about a second, maybe less. However, the process 'stalls' after that for between 15-30 seconds, and then ends correctly. I have tried to use timeouts, but they did not have any effects (did not really expect them to, but just in case). My setup is Debian 4.0, php 5.2.0-8+etch7. Unfortunately I don't know the other server OS's/applications. I found similar questions in posts from 2002 and 2003, but there were no replies (2002-04-30 guido.d.berger and 2003-11-25 thomas weber). Any ideas greatly appreciated, Alvar