Question

I wrote a script that pulls the current top Twitter trends using cURL and it works 100% of the time locally but when I FTP it up to my mediatemple server it seems to only work sometimes. Is this caused by Twitter? Mediatemple? Some error in my code?

EDIT: How can I cache content in a flat-file?

Answer 1

If the code works sometimes that suggests it is not a problem with your code so there are two logical areas for potential blame:

1) Web Server Load

This could be your server is to bogged down. If the server (not just your site – consider this if your on shared hosting) is experiencing a heavy load then it may take your server too long to complete the curl request. to combat this try and increase the timeout time on the request using the following:

CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT

2) Twitter Rate Limmit

Twitter limits the number of API calls you can make from one authorized account per hour (I believe the number is around 100ish – check their API Documentation) If you are hitting this limit you will be declined further calls until the 1 hour anniversary of the first call. To combat this have either a cron job run the curl at a set interval and cache the result in a text file or database or store the time of each request made and use an IF to only allow one request every 2 or 3 mins, cache the results and pull the results from the cache.

Making a call to the twitter API every time there is a page load is a waste of resources, bandwith and could reduce page load time.