note 101026 modified in function.file-get-contents by danbrown

If your file_get_contents freezes during several seconds, here is maybe your answer: Beware that the default keepalive timeout of Apache 2.0 httpd is 15 seconds. This is true for HTTP/1.1 connections, which is not the default behavior of file_get_contents but you can force it, especially if you are trying to act as a web browser. I don't know if this is also the case for HTTP/1.0 connections. Forcing the server to close the connection would make you gain those 15 seconds in your script: <?php $context = stream_context_create(array('http' => array('header'=>'Connection: close'))); $content = file_get_contents("http://www.example.com/test.html"); ?> Another way of resolving slowness issues is to use cURL or fsockopen. Bear in mind that contrary to the behavior of web browsers, file_get_contents doesn't return the result when the web page is fully downloaded (i.e. HTTP payload length = value of the response HTTP "Content-Length" header) but when the TCP connection is closed. I hope this behavior will change in future releases of PHP. This has been experienced with PHP 5.3.3. --was-- If your file_get_contents freezes during several seconds, here is maybe your answer: Beware that the default keepalive timeout of Apache 2.0 httpd is 15 seconds. This is true for HTTP/1.1 connections, which is not the default behavior of file_get_contents but you can force it, especially if you are trying to act as a web browser. I don't know if this is also the case for HTTP/1.0 connections. Forcing the server to close the connection would make you gain those 15 seconds in your script: $context = stream_context_create(array('http' => array('header'=>'Connection: close'))); $content = file_get_contents("http://www.somesite.com/test.html"); Another way of resolving slowness issues is to use cURL or fsockopen. Bear in mind that contrary to the behavior of web browsers, file_get_contents doesn't return the result when the web page is fully downloaded (i.e. HTTP payload length = value of the response HTTP "Content-Length" header) but when the TCP connection is closed. I hope this behavior will change in future releases of PHP. This has been experienced with PHP 5.3.3. http://php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php