Consider this code in a php file on my VPS server:
I just ran the same configuration you gave and got the following:
array
'url' => string 'http://www.google.com' (length=21)
'content_type' => string 'text/html; charset=UTF-8' (length=24)
'http_code' => int 200
'header_size' => int 2079
'request_size' => int 151
'filetime' => int -1
'ssl_verify_result' => int 0
'redirect_count' => int 0
'total_time' => float 0.281
'namelookup_time' => float 0
'connect_time' => float 0
'pretransfer_time' => float 0
'size_upload' => float 0
'size_download' => float 23168
'speed_download' => float 82448
'speed_upload' => float 0
'download_content_length' => float -1
'upload_content_length' => float 0
'starttransfer_time' => float 0.187
'redirect_time' => float 0
'certinfo' =>
array
empty
'redirect_url' => string '' (length=0)
My guess is that your server connection itself might be having bandwidth issues and/or being taxed somehow by another process.