cURL takes too long to load

Question

I am calling a REST endpoint in PHP using cURL to fetch some JSON data:

Answer 1

I found the solution to my problem. As I had mentioned in the question, the service was loading the fastest in browsers. So, I checked the 'Request Headers' of the request in the 'Network' tab of Google Chrome Inspector. I copied those headers and used them in my cURL request in PHP. After scraping those headers I found that all I needed to do was to add an Accept-Encoding header. I passed a value of gzip like so:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, 'gzip');

but setting it to an empty string also works.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_ENCODING, '');

According to the php.net manual for CURLOPT_ENCODING:

The contents of the "Accept-Encoding: " header. This enables decoding of the response. Supported encodings are "identity", "deflate", and "gzip". If an empty string, "", is set, a header containing all supported encoding types is sent.