Performance issue with php remote url fread operation - php

Question

I have a performance problem with my script (below).
The fread operation takes a lot of time, I get times like:
$time_split2 == 0.00135s
$time_split3 == 15.01747s
I have tested it even with a remote script that does nothing except echoing OK message - there is still the aprox. 15 seconds execution time
What could be the problem or how could I solve it another way.
I would prefer not to use curl (would that speed up things?) since the curl is not always installed with PHP, and I would like my code to be portable
$opts = array('http' =>
array(
'method' => 'POST',
'header' => array('Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded', 'Custom-header: test'),
'content' => $postdata,
'timeout' => 60
)
);
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$time_split = microtime(true);
$fp = fopen('http://someremotedomain/script.php', 'r', false, $context);
$time_split2 = microtime(true);
while(!feof($fp))
$result .= fread($fp, 4096);
fclose($fp);
$time_split3 = microtime(true);
$time_split2 = round($time_split2 - $time_split, 5);
$time_split3 = round($time_split3 - $time_split, 5);
UPDATE
I have used your suggestions - file_get_contents() + Connection: close - it doesn't work yet - file_get_contents() works with a delay and returns an empty string but - I have isolated the problem, here is the $postdata:
$postdata = http_build_query(
array('body' => $mail_html_content,
'from' => 'test <test#test.com>',
'to' => 'test2 <test2#test.com>',
)
);
when I remove 'body' from the array - file_get_contents() works fine and without any delays - how could this create a problem - $mail_html_content contains just a simple HTML string and it is not a big string
UPDATE 2
I have isolated the problem even more - when the length of the $postdata string exceeds 1024 chars, file_get_contents() starts to return empty values, below that value everything works fine, since method POST isn't limited by length of the data (at least for such low numbers) what could be the problem now??

Answer 1

You should try file_get_contents() instead of use while(!feof($fp)).
E.g.
/* EDIT: header should be something like that */
$opts = array(
'http' => array(
'method'=>"POST",
'header'=>"Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8",
),
);
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$result = file_get_contents('http://someremotedomain/script.php', false, $context);
For other header information look here
Reason
according to fread documentation:
Note:
If you just want to get the contents of a file into a string, use file_get_contents() as
it has much better performance than the code above.