strange CURL problems

ekhoo

I use CURL to fetch XML output from another webserver. Several days ago, it stopped working.

I created a testpage and it quits after timing out. If I run curl example.com or execute the php script on the server (sudo -u nobody php testcurl.php), it works. It just doesn't work when called by apache.

No idea what went wrong though.

testcurl.php code snippet:
echo curl_version();
$sURL = "http://www.example.com";
$ch = curl_init($sURL);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $sURL);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60);

curl_exec($ch);
echo "<p>".curl_error($ch);
curl_close ($ch);

btw, I do have curl compiled into PHP ('--with-curl=../curl-7.10.3') and the version of PHP is 4.3.7

drawmack

Your script is working fine on my server.

ekhoo

I suspect something's up with the server but is there anything I can do to display more debug information?? BTW, what do you get when you echo $ch?

All I get is usually:

Operation timed out with 0 out of -1 bytes received

drawmack

I modified it thusly

echo curl_version(); 
$sURL = "http://www.example.com"; 
$ch = curl_init($sURL); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 1); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $sURL); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1); 
curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60); 

$html = curl_exec($ch); 
echo "<p>Errors<br />".curl_error($ch);
echo nl2br(str_replace(" ","&nbsp;",htmlentities($html)));      

curl_close ($ch);

And got this output

bcurl/7.10.5 OpenSSL/0.9.7a zlib/1.1.4

Errors
<HTML>
<HEAD>
  <TITLE>Example Web Page</TITLE>
</HEAD> 
<body>  

<p>You have reached this web page by typing &quot;example.com&quot;,
&quot;example.net&quot;,
  or &quot;example.org&quot; into your web browser.</p>
<p>These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available 
  for registration. See <a href="http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2606.txt">RFC 
  2606</a>, Section 3.</p>
</BODY>
</HTML>

ekhoo

What I get is:

libcurl/7.10.3 OpenSSL/0.9.7a zlib/1.1.4

Errors
Operation timed out with 0 out of -1 bytes received.

If I ssh in and run "php testcurl.php" it will output correctly... weird!!

drawmack

Does it actually take the full 60 seconds to time out?

ekhoo

Yes. If I set the timeout to 30, it will end quicker.

It's solved now. It's my dedicated server so got the hosting company to check the system backups and the php.ini changed. Thanks!

drawmack

Did they tell you what value changed?

I just ask so that when someone search the forum for this in the future they have the resolution.

ekhoo

No they didn't give specifics. I have made copies of php.ini and phpinfo.

One thing I left on was this server auto-update thing (it's installed with Dedicated Server Manager - DSM) so it's auto-update puts in errata, patches, etc. I turned it off now but I'll have to check if certain patches are available and manually install it. At least I know if I broke something.