fread vs. file_get_contents

[etrader]

I want to load and display the content of a text file (actually it is a cache file). I tested both method using a long for loop as

 

for ($i=0; $i < 10000; $i++) {
$handle = fopen("test.txt", "r");
$text = fread($handle, filesize("test.txt"));
fclose($handle);
echo $text;
}

and

for ($i=0; $i < 10000; $i++) {
$text = file_get_contents("test.txt");
echo $text;
}

 

but the results were similar, though with a large distribution of the comparative data. The speed of a method was 0.5 to 2.0 faster than the other one (in various runs). Which method do you recommend? Could you please quote the pros and cons of each method?