On one of my sites I'm trying to include news from our forums. Here is a copy of the code in my index.php file.
<?php
include("/home/in/public_html/Inserts/upper.html");
include("http://www.iwnation.com/Forums/ssi.php?a=news&show=5");
include("/home/in/public_html/Inserts/lower.html");
?>
Unfortunately it takes a long time, often two days, for the news to show up. Any reason why this is, and any reason how to fix it??

The only reason why your includes are slow is because of the huge images that the url has.

It takes ages to load on a regular browser.

To always test what you put in an include, you first need to check the link in a browser. If it is slow in a browser, chances are it will be slow in the include too.

But it's not just because of that, the server has been decently slow the past two days but the news has been messed for much longer.

use readfile() instead of include()

Yes you shouldn't use include or require for remote files. Gives more problems than it solves.

You can also use fread...

fopen with fread I have discovered some bugs with reading remote files. It's much more reliable to use fsockopen

Originally posted by Rich2k
fopen with fread I have discovered some bugs with reading remote files. It's much more reliable to use fsockopen

fopen/fread seems to work for my nicely.. I had to make a bot that parsed alil over 100,000 pages. Took a day because it was remote... but it worked! :D

fsockopen works fine, but it will also include headers and almost every http variable. With fopen and fread you can receive only the needed data.

then use something like this to split header and data:

list($header, $data) = explode("\r\n\r\n", $str, 2);

readfile() seems to work :)

why do more work when you don't have to?!

Originally posted by mg-
why do more work when you don't have to?!
yep, exactly. if you need to echo file use readfile(), if you need to get it in string use file_get_contents().

Originally posted by mg-
fopen/fread seems to work for my nicely.. I had to make a bot that parsed alil over 100,000 pages. Took a day because it was remote... but it worked! :D

Well for me ever since PHP 4.3.2 (and I did find a reference to this in the PHP bugs database once) it stops reading remote files after a certain number of characters (regardless of what you put in the fread() statement)).

Rich2k,

You can avoid that using feof()

Yeah but it's much better to use streams if possible so I switched away from using fopen() completely for remote files.