Fastest way to download multiple urls - php

Question

I have a web portal that needs to download many of separate json files and display their contents in a sort of form view. By lots I mean 32 separate files minimum.
I've tried cUrl with brute force iteration and its taking ~12.5 seconds.
I've tried curl_multi_exec as demonstrated here http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.curl-multi-init.php with the function below and its taking ~9 seconds. A little better but still terribly slow.
function multiple_threads_request($nodes){
$mh = curl_multi_init();
$curl_array = array();
foreach($nodes as $i => $url)
{
$curl_array[$i] = curl_init($url);
curl_setopt($curl_array[$i], CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_multi_add_handle($mh, $curl_array[$i]);
}
$running = NULL;
do {
curl_multi_exec($mh,$running);
} while($running > 0);
$res = array();
foreach($nodes as $i => $url)
{
$res[$url] = curl_multi_getcontent($curl_array[$i]);
}
foreach($nodes as $i => $url){
curl_multi_remove_handle($mh, $curl_array[$i]);
}
curl_multi_close($mh);
return $res;
}
I realize this is an inherently expensive operation but does anyone know any other alternatives that might faster?
EDIT: In the end, my system was limiting curl_multi_exec and moving the code to a production machine saw dramatic improvements

Answer 1

You should definitely look into benchmarking your cURLs to see which one has the slowdown but this was too lengthy for a comment so let me know if it helps or not:
// revert to "cURLing with brute force iteration" as you described it :)
$curl_timer = array();
foreach($curlsite as $row)
{
$start = microtime(true);
/**
* curl code
*/
$curl_timer[] = (microtime(true)-$start);
}
echo '<pre>'.print_r($curl_timer, true).'</pre>';