[RESOLVED] Multiple internet connections

lar5

Hi, i am new here, maybe someone can help me out with my problem.

I need to read from 2 or more URLs simultaneously.
Or, while waiting for a URL to open, try to open anouther.

Any help would be very much appreciated, i do PHP for 2 years now and have no clue how to do this.

Thanks in advance, lar.
(i searched the forum but could not find anything useful)

bpat1434

Can you just call [man]fopen/man or [man]file_get_contents/man twice to do what you want? I'm not sure I fully understand the question. PHP won't read from it simultaneously, but it will read linearly and you can get the contents and compare them . . .

lar5

If i call fopen twice php reads the first URL (takes some time) then reads the second URL (again, takes some time).

What i need to do is to read several URLs on different servers. This will take very long if one URL after the outher is processed. Maybe there is a way with Curl to read multiple URLs at the same time?

bpat1434

From what I know, you can't do concurrent connections, except when there are two people visiting the site at the same time.

I dont' think cURL actually can do that. I'm not sure.

lar5

I just found this curl script that claims to do this:
http://curl.netmirror.org/libcurl/php/examples/multi.html

Sadly i cant try it since i have PHP 4.4.3 and it needs 5.0. (iam asking my host to update PHP)

bpat1434

Ha... good luck with that. Most hosts won't upgrade because of the incompatibility issues. But if you get PHP5, I guess you've found your solution...

lar5

They asked me if i want PHP5 in addition or replace PHP4. What do you think? Should i replace it?

justsomeone

In order to have your script do multiple things simultaneously, you need to get into threading which has been introduced into PHP since 4.1 (but may not be turned on by default by your host).

Check the pcntl_fork() manual page for more info.

lar5

Thanks for the replies!
I just got my server updated to PHP5 and tested the curl script:
It works perfectly but i need to still do some performance testing.

Thanks again,
lar