Why is file_get_contents() faster than using fsock_open()?
- by eds
In PHP, sometimes I want to send an HTTP request to a remote site just to look at the response headers, so I declare it all manually and use the fsock_open() function. However, this goes much slower than calling file_get_contents() with a remote URL (which loads the whole page content). Why is this? Is there a good alternative way to get just the response headers (to check if a page returns a 404 error, for example) that works as fast as file_get_contents()?
