Efficiency: HTTP Page Requests

[br0ken]

I'm writing a small spider like application that requests a lot of pages. I know there is a lot of different ways to do this and I was wondering which way would be the most efficient.

 

The methods I know are fopen, fsockopen and file_get_contents.

 

Also, what's the difference between fopen and fsockopen?

 

Thanks!

[gffg4574fghsDSGDGKJYM]

The most efficients way will probably be multi thread curl

 

http://www.google.com/search?q=multi+thread+php+curl

 

cUrl offer more options that fopen,fsockopen and file_get_contents and with multi thread you can download many pages at once.

 

the difference between fsockopen and fopen is fsockopen open a connection over internet to grab the file (URL), fopen open the file locally.

 

With the options "allow_url_fopen = On" in php.ini it allow fopen to open file locally or open a connection over internet like fsockopen if the file is a URL.