PHP fsockopen Is Slow - php

Question

I'm playing around with the IMAP protocol in PHP using fsockopen to send and receive commands. My preliminary experiments work but are insanely slow. It takes about 2 minutes for the simple function below to run. I've tried several different IMAP servers and have gotten the same result. Can anyone tell me why this code is so slow?
<?php
function connectToServer($host, $port, $timeout) {
// Connect to the server
$conn = fsockopen($host, $port, $errno, $errstr, $timeout);
// Write IMAP Command
$command = "a001 CAPABILITY\r\n";
// Send Command
fputs($conn, $command, strlen($command));
// Read in responses
while (!feof($conn)) {
$data .= fgets($conn, 1024);
}
// Display Responses
print $data;
// Close connection to server
fclose($conn);
}
connectToServer('mail.me.com', 143, 30);
?>
This is the response I get back:
macinjosh:Desktop Josh$ php test.php
* OK [CAPABILITY mmp0613 IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 ACL QUOTA LITERAL+ NAMESPACE UIDPLUS CHILDREN BINARY UNSELECT SORT LANGUAGE IDLE XSENDER X-NETSCAPE XSERVERINFO X-SUN-SORT X-SUN-IMAP X-ANNOTATEMORE X-UNAUTHENTICATE XUM1 AUTH=PLAIN STARTTLS] Messaging Multiplexor (Sun Java(tm) System Messaging Server 6.3-6.03 (built Jun 5 2008))
* CAPABILITY mmp0613 IMAP4 IMAP4rev1 ACL QUOTA LITERAL+ NAMESPACE UIDPLUS CHILDREN BINARY UNSELECT SORT LANGUAGE IDLE XSENDER X-NETSCAPE XSERVERINFO X-SUN-SORT X-SUN-IMAP X-ANNOTATEMORE X-UNAUTHENTICATE XUM1 AUTH=PLAIN STARTTLS
a001 OK CAPABILITY completed

Answer 1

It seems like feof won't return true until the remote side times out and closes the connection. The $timeout parameter that you are passing only applies to the initial connection attempt.
Try changing your while loop to print the status directly:
while (!feof($conn)) {
print fgets($conn, 1024);
}
Or change your loop exit condition to break after its read the full reply. It would probably have to be smarter about the protocol.
Finally, I have to ask, why aren't you using PHP's built-in IMAP client?