Question

stream_get_contents doesn’t seem to handle persistent (KeepAlive) connections correctly. It waits for the connection to timeout before returning. Apache 2.2 has a KeepAliveTimeout of 5 seconds by default. Is there anything I can do about this? (Aside from disabling KeepAlive on the server, or using protocol_version 1.0)

$opts = array('http' =>
    array(
        'method' => 'GET',
        'protocol_version' => 1.1,
    )
);
$context = stream_context_create($opts);
$stream = fopen('http://google.com', 'r', false, $context);
$metadata = stream_get_meta_data($stream);
$data = stream_get_contents($stream);
fclose($stream);

Thanks.

Answer 1

$opts = array('http' =>
    array(
        'method' => 'GET',
        'protocol_version' => 1.1,
        'header' => 'Connection: close'
    )
);

Connection: close tells the server not to use a persistent connection and to drop the TCP connection after the response has been sent.

This is part of the HTTP/1.1 standard, and as the PHP manual says:

If [protocol_version] is set to 1.1 it is your responsibility to be 1.1 compliant.