Using php to ping a website

Question

I want to create a php script that will ping a domain and list the response time along with the total size of the request. This will be used for monitoring a network of websites. I took a pass at it with curl. Can you think of a better option?

This is mostly all from comments on php.net and more of a proof of concept then anything else. I know it's not the cleanest code.

function curlTest2($url) {

 clearstatcache();

 $return = '';

 if(substr($url,0,4)!="http") $url = "http://".$url;

 $userAgent = 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)';

 $ch = curl_init($url);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 1);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, 1);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $userAgent);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
 curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 15);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FAILONERROR, 1);
 curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FRESH_CONNECT, 1);

 $execute = curl_exec($ch);

 // Check if any error occured
 if(!curl_errno($ch)) {
  $bytes   = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_CONTENT_LENGTH_DOWNLOAD);
  $total_time = curl_getinfo($ch, CURLINFO_TOTAL_TIME);
  $return = 'Took ' . $total_time . ' / Bytes: '. $bytes;        
 } else {
  $return = 'Error reaching domain';
 }
 curl_close($ch);

 return $return;

}

And here is one using fopen

function fopenTest($link) {

 if(substr($link,0,4)!="http"){ 
 $link = "http://".$link;
 }

 $timestart = microtime();

 $churl = @fopen($link,'r');

 $timeend = microtime();
 $diff = number_format(((substr($timeend,0,9)) + (substr($timeend,-10)) - (substr($timestart,0,9)) - (substr($timestart,-10))),4);
 $diff = $diff*100;

 if (!$churl) {
  $message="Offline";
 }else{
  $message="Online. Time : ".$diff."ms ";
 }

 fclose($churl); 

 return  $message;

}

Answer 1

You could use xmlrpc (xmlrpc_client). Not sure what the advantages/disadvantages to curl are.

Drupal uses xmlrpc for this purpose (look at the ping module).

Answer 2

Using curl is fine.

Not sure if I'd use that useragent string though. Rather make a custom one unless you specifically need to.

Answer 3

maybe this pear Net_Ping is what you are looking for. It's no more maintained but it works.

Answer 4

When doing quick scripts for one time tasks I just exec() wget:

$response = `wget http://google.com -O -`;

It's simple and takes care of redirects.

If you're using suhosin patches and curl you may encounter problems with http redirect (301, 302...), suhosin won't allow it.

Answer 5

I'm not sure about Curl/Fopen but this benchmark says file_get_contents have better performance then fopen.

Answer 6

Obviously curl's got all kinds of cool things, but remember, you can always make use of built in tools by invoking them from the command line like this:

$site = "google.com";
ob_start();
system("ping " . escapeshellarg($site));
print ob_end_flush();

Only thing to keep in mind, this isn't going to be as cross platform as curl might be; although the curl extension is not enabled by default either..

Answer 7

If remote fopen is enabled, file_get_contents() will do the trick too.