CURL starttransfer_time execution slow - php

Question

I have a php page that does an order lookup. In the order summary page, I do a while loop to bring up all of the orders. Normally doing this is just fine and isn't an issue. Recently I decided to add the ability to see an order "status" based on its JIRA issue/ticket status. So for instance, if the JIRA ticket state is open, then the order status is "open" as well. If it the JIRA ticket is closed, the order status is "closed" as well.
The way I am doing JIRA ticket lookups is via a CURL GET request. Here is an example of the code:
// CHECK JIRA TICKET
$username = 'xxxx';
$password = 'xxxx';
$proxy = 'http://xxxx.xxxx.xxxx:8080/';
$url = "http://xxxx.xxxx.xxxx/rest/api/2/issue/".$row['jira_ticket']."?fields=status";
$ch = curl_init();
$headers = array(
'Accept: application/json',
'Content-Type: application/json'
);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, $headers);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CUSTOMREQUEST, "GET");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_PROXY, $proxy);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, false);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_IPRESOLVE, CURL_IPRESOLVE_V4);
$ticket_result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
In order for me to get a JIRA ticket status for each order, I am running this CURL GET request within a while loop. Example of code:
$results = mysqli query...;
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($results))
{
....define some variables
....the CURL code
....etc
}
The issue I am having is that the more orders I have, the longer it takes to load the page. I know for certain this is due to the CURL GET request within the while loop, because if I remove it, then the page loads quickly. When I debug the CURL request, the longest time I am seeing is starttransfer_time. Example:
[http_code] => 405
[header_size] => 639
[request_size] => 239
[filetime] => -1
[ssl_verify_result] => 0
[redirect_count] => 0
[total_time] => 0.294348
[namelookup_time] => 0.004216
[connect_time] => 0.004885
[pretransfer_time] => 0.004928
[size_upload] => 0
[size_download] => 1013
[speed_download] => 3441
[speed_upload] => 0
[download_content_length] => 1013
[upload_content_length] => -1
[starttransfer_time] => 0.294315
[redirect_time] => 0
Sometimes it can go up to .5 seconds. So my question...is there any way I can speed up the CURL request? If not, is there a better way to approach what I'm attempting to do?
EDIT:
I have a workaround, though not really an answer. For the time being I will just store the "order status" as a column in MySQL, and have the actual JIRA CURL request in a different file run as a background cron job that runs every so often. It's not perfect, but at least this allows for the pages to come up much quicker.