retrieving remote data; safeguard against remote location beind down?

[schwim]

Hi there everyone,

I've got a script that checks for a new version at the parent site. Thanks to help here on the forum previously, this is the code that is used:

if($ver_check == 1) {
		  $site = 'www.site.com.com';
		  $address = "/scripts/versions/script_version.php";
        $fp = @fsockopen($site, 80, $errno, $errstr, 5);
		if ($fp) {

	   $version = '';

   	$out = "GET $address HTTP/1.1\r\n";
     $out .= "Host: $site\r\n";
   	$out .= "Connection: Close\r\n\r\n";

	fwrite($fp, $out);
	while(!feof($fp)) {
	   $tmp = fgets($fp, 1024);
	   if(strpos($tmp, 'version:') !== FALSE) {
	      $version = trim(substr($tmp, 9));
	      break;
	   }
	}

I'm now expanding the remote connection to retrieve latest news. I'm wondering however if I need to take precautions for the script to be unable to retrieve the data. The version check is at the bottom of the page, so during a stall, it's practically unnoticable, since the page has already loaded. The news will be at the center of the page, however so if it can't contact the parent site, it will stall the page load until PHP feels sufficient time has elapsed(I forget what this time period was).

Is there a way to set the timeout shorter? Something else I can do maybe, or is this just a risk you run when attempting something like this?

Thoughts are appreciated.

thanks,
json

[dagon]

if a socket is not opened the script will end (you have an if $fp statment), so i dont see any real problem, you can alwyas test it it by giving it a fake url and seeing how long it takes.

the '5' at the end of the fsockopen() is the timeout, if need be you can adjust that.

I would be inclined to retrieve the news in the background once an hour (or however often you need) via a script run by a cronjob then store it, that way there wont be an issue if you cant retrieve the news for what ever reason.

[schwim]

Thanks very much dagon for your help. The additional info on the function was(obviously) much needed 🙂

In this case, a cron job wouldn't be the preferred method, as it's a publicly available script with one of the main focuses being the ease and speed of install. Most end users aren't hot on creating cron jobs for something that's really not a main feature of the script. I think sticking with the current method would be preferrable. If it kills the script generation, maybe include the news block via an iframe or similar to prohibit the early demise of the script generation.

[dagon]

you could still cache the results with out using a cron job - but that may or may not be feasible in this situation.