Which is better fsockopen or ping

[jwright]

I am testing to see if routers are up on my wan and I have a nice php script which runs every five minutes and stores in a database if the routers are up or down. At first I was using the ping command but it seemed slow and kept reporting false downs because some of are wan links are via satellite which causes pack loss. The other day I switched to fsockopen() which works great plus I can set a timeout. The only issue is I am opening a port to 23(telnet) every five minutes

Not sure but this could be causing more traffic than ping. Is ping still my best choice or is there a better php function.

thanks

[[deleted]]

If ping gives false reports, then it's not an option is it? :-)

Opening a telnet connection every 5 minutes gives just a few hundred bytes extra per connection, not a big deal.