If you work with streams in PHP, Dotvoid has a tip that just might come in handy some day in the future. The tip deals with the difference between HTTP 1.1 and 1.0.

I have a class that I wrote some time ago that is called URLImporter. It's simple, does what it is supposed to do and thus makes my life easier. Essentially it helps me fetch URL resources - mostly dynamically generated data from password protected extranets that require me to use HTTP POST.

Up until recently this class have only been used behind an http proxy. The other day I moved it to another machine - that is not behind a proxy and suddenly it stopped working.

He realized the problem after a bit of research - HTTP 1.1 automatically performs a "keep alive" on the connection, not timing out after the transaction's done like 1.0 does. His solution? Passing another HTTP header to the stream connection: "Connection: close".