How to speed up cURL in php?

Question

I'm trying to get embed tweet from Twitter. So, I'm using cURL to get the json back. I wrote a little test but the test takes around 5 seconds as well as when I run locally. So, I'm not sure what am I doing wrong here.

public function get_tweet_embed($tw_id) {

    $json_url = "https://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/oembed.json?id={$tw_id}&align=left&omit_script=true&hide_media=false";

    $ch = curl_init( $json_url );
    $start_time = microtime(TRUE);
    $JSON = curl_exec($ch);
    $end_time = microtime(TRUE);
    echo $end_time - $start_time; //5.7961111068726

    return $this->get_html($JSON);
}

private function get_html($embed_json) {
    $JSON_Data = json_decode($embed_json,true);
    $tw_embed_code = $JSON_Data["html"];
    return $tw_embed_code;
}

When I paste the link and test it from the browser it's really fast.

Answer 1

The best speed up I've ever had was reusing the same curl handle. Replace $ch = curl_init( $json_url ); with curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);. Then outside the functions have one $ch = curl_init();. You'll need to make $ch global in the functions to access it.

Reusing the curl handle keeps the connection to the server open. This only works if the server is the same between requests, as yours are.