using file get contents or curl

Question

I was ask to use a simple facebook api to return the number of likes or shares at work which return json string. Now since i am going to do this for a very large amount of links, which one is better:

Using file_get_contents or cURL.

Both of them seem to return the same results and cURL seems to be more complicated to use, but what is the difference among them. why do most people recommend using cURL over file_get_contents? Before i run the api which might take a whole day to process, i will like to have feedback.

Answer 1

A few years ago I benchmarked the two and CURL was faster. With CURL you create one CURL instance which can be used for every request, and it maps directly to the very fast libcurl library. Using file_get_contents you have the overhead of protocol wrappers and the initialization code getting executed for every single request.

I will dig out my benchmark script and run on PHP 5.3 but I suspect that CURL will still be faster.

Answer 2

cURL supports https requests more widely than file_get_contents and it's not too terribly complicated. Although the one-line file_get_contents solution sure is clean looking, it's behind-the-scene overhead is larger than cURL.

$curl_handle=curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_URL,$feedURL);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,true);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);

This is what I use to make facebook api calls as many of them require an access_token and facebook will only accept access_token information in a secure connection. I've also noticed a large difference in execution time (cURL is much faster).