Slow + fopen()

[ibc218]

I have a small application that grabs Yahoo Financial stock quotes for my web page. It's really simple, and the only non-trivial part of the code is this:

$fp = fopen($yahoo_url, "r"); //open the file storing yahoo stock info

This worked fine for a day or so, but now it runs really slow (it now takes 15 seconds to complete when it used to only take two or three). I think it has to do with the fact that my site gets quite a bit of traffic, and requesting this resource so often is getting me into trouble with Yahoo or my host. It's almost like one of them is telling my page "stop doing that" by throttling the request/response.

I'm a PHP n00b, so any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[rct-hc]

It could be that they are indeed slowing you down... that would be very weird though cause most servers like that would just block you (instead of slowing you down).

I would suggest grabbing the image and caching/saving it to your own server.. and maybe update it every hour or so. You would load the image from your own server so wouldn't be dependent on Yahoo's speed (or slowness)... plus you won't send Yahoo a request every time you get a new visitor.