faster fopen or file_get_contents?

Question

i am running multiple websites with high traffic , as a requirement , all images are downloaded via image.php?id=IMAGE_ID_HERE . If you ever done that before , you

Answer 1

Why dont you cache the image content with apc ?

if(!apc_exists('img_'.$id)){
    apc_store('img_'.$id,file_get_content(...));
}

echo apc_fetch('img_'.$id);

this way image content will not be read from your disk more than once.