note 61556 deleted from ref.curl by danbrown

Note Submitter: amandato (at) gmail (period) com ---- To shed some light on some of the numbers trucex at gmail has in his tests, some of the web pages (Yahoo and GoDaddy) downloaded at exceptionally faster speeds than with file_get_contents(). This is simply because CURL accepts (by default) compression protocols such as deflate and gzip. Most likely GoDaddy.com may be using compression for specific HTTP clients including CURL. I know for a fact that Yahoo.com and Google.com use gzip compression. You can test servers for gzip compression here: http://www.whatsmyip.org/mod_gzip_test/ For the sake of performance, I would recommend the use of CURL. if performance was not an issue and I wanted to keep my code simple and portable (for PHP servers without the cURL extension) I would use file_get_contents().