Hi Guys,

I have been working on a php page that when required pulls data from 2 places.

1st it gathers data from our mysql database and then depending on the results of our data it may go off and connect to a external xml service and try to pull data from there.

My problem is ...

When we get our data if there is no reason to send the xml request it all works great. However, if our data say's 'xml' request required we fire off the xml request.
I know this works fine as i can see it in the ie browser.
The problem comes when the xml source (the provider) has server issues or downtime. We continue to fire of xml requests and our server just sits and waits for the xml to come back which of course doesn't for one reason or another. Its got to a stage on our server ...

Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)

That we are waiting for thousands of xml requests to return and in the end our server crashes.

Is there a way in php to say if the xml does not reyurn in 5 seconds then end the request and output to the browser with out the xml data?

Thanks
Trev

I don't know - but I wonder if chaning the default socket timeout may help - see http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/ref.filesystem.php#ini.default-socket-timeout

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