Are sockets so slow in PHP? - php

Question

I'm using this code for sockets. Console says that the page is processed for a very small amount of time, but Chrome says that page is loading for ~1 second!
$this->serv_sock = socket_create(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
socket_bind($this->serv_sock, $this->serv, $this->port) or die("Could not bind to address\n");
socket_listen($this->serv_sock);
while (1) {
echo "Waiting...\n";
$client = socket_accept($this->serv_sock);
$start_mtime = microtime(true);
echo "Accepted at ".$start_mtime.".\n";
$input = '';
$len = 0;
do {
//echo "Reading.\n";
$inp = socket_read($client, 1024);
$input .= $inp;
if (strpos($input, "\n\n") === false && strpos($input, "\r\n\r\n") === false)
continue;
if (!$len) {
if (!preg_match("/Content-Length: (\d+)/", $input, $matches)) {
break;
}
$len = $matches[1];
if (!$len)
break;
echo "We want $len bytes.\n";
}
if (strpos($input, "\n\n") !== false)
list($headers, $content) = explode("\n\n", $input);
else
list($headers, $content) = explode("\r\n\r\n", $input);
if (strlen($content) >= $len)
break;
} while ($inp);
echo "Calling callback as ".microtime(true).".\n";
if (strpos($input, "\n\n") !== false)
list($headers, $content) = explode("\n\n", $input);
else
list($headers, $content) = explode("\r\n\r\n", $input);
$output = $this->translate($callback, $headers, $content); // nothing slow here
$time_end = microtime(true);
echo "Sending output at ".$time_end." (total ".($time_end - $start_mtime).")\n\n";
$output = "HTTP/1.0 Ok\n".
"Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8\n".
"Content-Length: ".strlen($output)."\n".
"Connection: close\n\n".
$output;
socket_write($client, $output);
socket_close($client);
}

Answer 1

If I understand what you're saying. As far as I know there is a difference between server processing time and client processing time.
The time it actually takes to process the information on the server will always be less. Once the server finishes processing the information the data still has to be sent to the browser and has to be rendered. The time for the data to get there and for the browser to render is what I'm suspecting the reason is as to why Chrome is telling you it's taking ~1 second.