PHP file_get_contents very slow when using full url

Question

I am working with a script (that I did not create originally) that generates a pdf file from an HTML page. The problem is that it is now taking a very long time, like 1-2 mi

Answer 1

I know that is old question but I found it today and answers didn't work for me. I didn't see anyone saying that max connections per IP may be set to 1. That way you are doing API request and API is doing another request because you use full url. That's why loading directly from disc works. For me that fixed a problem:

if (strpos($file->url, env('APP_URL')) === 0) {
    $url = substr($file->url, strlen(env('APP_URL')));
} else {
    $url = $file->url;
}
return file_get_contents($url);

Answer 2

Note: This has been fixed in PHP 5.6.14. A Connection: close header will now automatically be sent even for HTTP/1.0 requests. See commit 4b1dff6.

I had a hard time figuring out the cause of the slowness of file_get_contents scripts.

By analyzing it with Wireshark, the issue (in my case and probably yours too) was that the remote web server DIDN'T CLOSE THE TCP CONNECTION UNTIL 15 SECONDS (i.e. "keep-alive").

Indeed, file_get_contents doesn't send a "connection" HTTP header, so the remote web server considers by default that's it's a keep-alive connection and doesn't close the TCP stream until 15 seconds (It might not be a standard value - depends on the server conf).

A normal browser would consider the page is fully loaded if the HTTP payload length reaches the length specified in the response Content-Length HTTP header. File_get_contents doesn't do this and that's a shame.

SOLUTION

SO, if you want to know the solution, here it is:

$context = stream_context_create(array('http' => array('header'=>'Connection: close\r\n')));
file_get_contents("http://www.something.com/somepage.html",false,$context);

The thing is just to tell the remote web server to close the connection when the download is complete, as file_get_contents isn't intelligent enough to do it by itself using the response Content-Length HTTP header.

Answer 3

I have a huge data passed by API, I'm using file_get_contents to read the data, but it took around 60 seconds. However, using KrisWebDev's solution it took around 25 seconds.

$context = stream_context_create(array('https' => array('header'=>'Connection: close\r\n')));
file_get_contents($url,false,$context);