Trying to get a large xml file through api.php - php

Question

I'm trying to get the contents of a large xml file from api.My problem is that it takes forever to response actually i waited an hours and still nothing.Even if i try the url to my browser it just time out.Is there a better way to get the file?
Here is my code
$fp = fopen('a.xml','wb');
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url);
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_HEADER,0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FILE, $fp);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
fclose($fp);
Update:
I used this code but its the same it keeps loading it think its some memory problem it tries to load the whole file before send it to simplexml.If i put RETURNTRANSFER to false it will lower memory usage?
$options = array(
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true, // return web page
CURLOPT_HEADER => false, // don't return headers
CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION => true, // follow redirects
CURLOPT_ENCODING => "", // handle all encodings
CURLOPT_USERAGENT => "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0", // something like Firefox
CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER => true, // set referer on redirect
CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT => 0, // timeout on connect
CURLOPT_TIMEOUT => 0, // timeout on response
CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS => 10, // stop after 10 redirects
);
$curl = curl_init('someurl.com');
curl_setopt_array( $curl, $options );
$content = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);

Answer 1

One problem I notice immediately with your code snippet is that you open a.xml by assigning the file handle to $fp, but you reference it in your curl_setopt as $fh.
How big is the XML? Depending on how much memory you allow php to consume, you could get the entire contents of the file with something as simple as:
$xmlString = file_get_contents('a.xml');
Or if you plan to process the xml further, you could load the file into a SimpleXMLElement:
$xml = simplexml_load_file('a.xml');
or into a DOMDocument:
$xmlDom = new DOMDocument();
$xmlDom->load('a.xml');