Website loading slow with cURLs

Question

I just finished this code for getting some informations about a game.

<?php 
$apik = 'API_KEY';
$versionurl = 'https://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/realms/na.json';



function request($url) {
    $ch = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
    $response = curl_exec($ch);
    curl_close($ch);

    $decode = json_decode($response);

    return $decode;
}



function getChamps(){

    $array = getChampsId();

    $champsn = count($array['champs']);

    $arrayb = array();
    $i = 0;

    do {
        $arrayb[$i] = $array['champs'][$i]->id;
        $i = $i+1;
    } while ($i<=$champsn-1);

    $i = 0;

    do {
        echo getChampsNames($arrayb[$i]);
        $i = $i+1;
    } while ($i<=$champsn-1);
}

function getChampsId() {
    global $apik;
    $url = 'https://euw.api.pvp.net/api/lol/euw/v1.2/champion?freeToPlay=true&api_key='.$apik;

    $req = request($url);

    $array = array();
    $array['champs'] = $req->champions;

    return $array;
}

function getChampsNames($id) {
    global $apik;
    $ver = getVers('champion');

    $url = 'https://global.api.pvp.net/api/lol/static-data/euw/v1.2/champion/'.$id.'?locale=en_US&version='.$ver.'&champData=all&api_key='.$apik;

    $req = request($url);

    $array = array();
    $array = $req->name;

    return $array;
}

function getVers($obj){
    $url = 'https://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/realms/na.json';

    $req = request($url);

    $array = array();
    $array = $req->n->$obj;

    return $array;
}



?>

And to call:

    getChamps();

The problem is that the website take like 30/40 (?) second to load.. why? I think there are too many curls? But I don't know any other method to do this, you have got some solution?

Answer 1

An important question to ask yourself is "How often is the source material changed?" Based on this being stats for a game tournament, my bet is it doesn't change every time you load the data.

CURL and fsockopen (and everything similar) are all blocking requests. That means PHP will wait until they are done before moving on. Worse, this is network communication so if the other end is slow, it could mean your page times out waiting. Since your source likely doesn't require a fresh load every time, I would suggest you move this into a cron job and parse the results into a database or flat file. Then do the local page loads from that source. That would remove any chance of a blocking issue causing problems because if the cron fails it will simply run again later.

Answer 2

In PHP, cURL blocks, so it has to wait for each cURL to finish before continuing on to the next. This is, perhaps, a short coming of PHP. If this script is being requested by a browser, you might be better off writing it on the client side and firing all requests simultaneously.

Have a look at some JavaScript frameworks such as:

• jQuery - It's showing it's age now but this is pretty much the grand daddy of JS Frameworks and a great place to start when learning.
• AngularJS - This is a full on MVVM application builder. It's modern, popular, and robust, using many of the latest techniques. If you haven't done MVVM (or even MVC) this could be a big paradigm shift but worth learning about.
• ReactJS - This is Facebook's up and coming framework. As with Angular, it's built on an ideal of programming which might be difficult for new comers, but again it's well worth learning about.

With all of these the basic methodology is to create a callback function or promise and give it to the thing handling your AJAX request. Once the request comes back, the function is called (or the promise is for filled). You can use this to change the state of your page.

You can fire multiple requests at the same time so don't forget your might callbacks might not happen in the order the requests were made. :)