In a quick post to her blog Lorna Mitchell mentions a deprecated method in pecl_http that could cause problems for you down the road - addRawPostData.

I'm a big fan of pecl_http, which I use quite often as I work so regularly with APIs and on systems where I can get it installed, it's much nicer than PHP's curl extension. Recently though I've been often seeing output which reads: Function HttpRequest::addRawPostData() is deprecated

The alternative is to use the "setBody()" method on the HttpRequest object instead. This, in effect, does the same thing and sets the contents of the message to the raw data you'd like to post. Unfortunately, the PHP manual page doesn't reflect that this method is deprecated. You can find out more about the functionality the "pecl_http" extension has to offer here. It's a very flexible and reliable way for your scripts to interact with remote servers via HTTP calls.

In a recent post to his blog Paul Reinheimer talks about a service (from WonderProxy) called Where's it Up? - a tool that can be used to see where in the world a site is up. He also outlines the technology behind it all.

The tool accepts a URL, and allows you to select global locations. It then attempts to connect to the given server and issue a HEAD request from the global locations you selected, and reports the results. [...] Building a reasonably robust application was trivial, thanks to being able to leverage the great technology built by others.

Tools that make up the application's stack include a Gearman server, curl, PHP with the pecl_http extension, memcached and supervisord. He details how they all fit together and why they built it in the first place.

Mike Wallner has announced the release of the first beta of the pecl_http PECL package, an extension that "aims to provide a convenient and powerful set of functionality for one of PHPs major applications."

So, finally a first beta of pecl_http 1.6 has been released. This is the first version which supports libcurls multi socket API introduced in 7.16 through libevent.

The rest of the post shows stats comparing the timing on a normal connection versus using the multi-socket API (on both an empty file and a 100k file).