Timeout setting for URL includes?

acidbox

On my site, I include some news from a 3rd party website (XML). To do this, I must fopen the XML page on the 3rd party site each time it is loaded. The problem is that the 3rd party site goes down every once in a blue moon, and when people go to MY site, it waits for a long time trying to connect to the 3rd party site, giving an appearance that MY site is down.

My question is, how do I tell PHP to wait a certain amount of time, say 5 seconds, and if the information is not received by then, set a flag that the connection was false. That way I can disable the news and say that there is a problem, instead of having to manually disable it and re-enable it once i realize their site is back up...

Thanks.

nozom

could you run a cron script every hour(or whatever) to check if the connection is alive. If it times out switch a dbase field to OFF which stops your site looking for it

maybe use

not that i've ever used it ;-)

Cheers,
hugh

acidbox

Thanks anyway, but that function doesnt even exist in PHP anymore. I'd like to keep it in PHP if I could.

anyone else?

Weedpacket

You could test the connection with fsockopen(), which has a timeout parameter. You could probably even retrieve the document through it at the same time.

acidbox

That seems to be working well.. Thanks weedpacket.. One question though, how long do you think it takes to determine if a connection can be made? If I set the timeout at 2 seconds, and there is a connection available, do you think it will be able to detect that connection in that amount of time?

matt_4013

Unless your host is having major latency troubles 2 seconds should be plenty of time 😉 I've got a game server query script set up, and I set it to timeout at 1 second, because anything above that it might as well be down anyway 😉 2 seconds is a hell of a long time in the world of web requests 🙂