Best way to get a minecraft servers status - query, stream_socket...? - php

Question

some time ago I used query to check the status of a minecraft server via. php, but I wasn´t so happy with the results. Sometimes it just took more than 10 seconds or didn´t even got the status although the mc server was up and the webserver within the same data center.
Which method do you think would work most stable and with a good performance: query, stream_stocket or something else ?
Should I run the test every 30 seconds via. a cronjob or just cache the results for 30 secs '?

Answer 1

You can create a PHP file with this code and run periodically to store the status.
<?php
/**
* #author Kristaps Karlsons <kristaps.karlsons#gmail.com>
* Licensed under MPL 1.1
*/
function mc_status($host,$port='25565') {
$timeInit = microtime();
// TODO: implement a way to store data (memcached or MySQL?) - please don't overload target server
$fp = fsockopen($host,$port,$errno,$errstr,$timeout=10);
if(!$fp) die($errstr.$errno);
else {
fputs($fp, "\xFE"); // xFE - get information about server
$response = '';
while(!feof($fp)) $response .= fgets($fp);
fclose($fp);
$timeEnd = microtime();
$response = str_replace("\x00", "", $response); // remove NULL
//$response = explode("\xFF", $response); // xFF - data start (old version, prior to 1.0?)
$response = explode("\xFF\x16", $response); // data start
$response = $response[1]; // chop off all before xFF (could be done with regex actually)
//echo(dechex(ord($response[0])));
$response = explode("\xA7", $response); // xA7 - delimiter
$timeDiff = $timeEnd-$timeInit;
$response[] = $timeDiff < 0 ? 0 : $timeDiff;
}
return $response;
}
$data = mc_status('mc.exs.lv','25592'); // even better - don't use hostname but provide IP instead (DNS lookup is a waste)
print_r($data); // [0] - motd, [1] - online, [2] - slots, [3] - time of request (in microseconds - use this to present latency information)
Credits: skakri (https://gist.github.com/skakri/2134554)