php api include simplexml timeout

[mwpclark]

I am looking for architecture suggestions. I have many different domains that use php to include an api call to a third party server. The results are xml and I use simplexml to parse the results.

Generally the third party api is very good. Sometimes, however, it is slow and causes pages not to load. Once it broke and I had thousands of pages not loading until the api was fixed.

I have been trying to eliminate http calls, so I am defining variables first, then including the script with simplexml. Everything I have read says there is no timeout function with simplexml.

The alternative would be to use file_get_contents, and throw a timeout in there somewhere. But this gets back to using http and the GET variable to define the variables, which results in many thousands of http calls.

Is there a simple way around this? That is, a way to generate and parse the xml, insert a timeout so the page load will not hang, and make the calls through the directory structure rather than http?

Thanks in advance for any tips!

Mike

 

[barryna]

We eliminate the third party server dependency by running cron jobs to store/update the data into a database. Then all of our web pages for our website simply pull from the database. If the API goes down, no problem, it uses the most up-to-date data stored in the database. Pretty common practice I would think.

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[mwpclark]

Thanks barryna, we did this for a while, but on conferring with the the api provider, learned they put time codes and session id's into individual links, so they must be grabbed in real-time in order to credit us for the traffic. This is a jobs display program that is paying fairly well, so we are living with the issues and hoping they don't crash again!

 

[jpadie]

i don't see how you use simplexml to GET the traffic.
normally you would create your outbound messages and bung them into the API via a soap client or using curl. then capture the response and parse it. with soap and curl you can absolutely set a timeout parameter.

simplexml has no method of getting remote data (other than the load file function with a remote wrapper, which I would not advise).

I would take the revenue hit and use cached data for a period of time until the server came back on line. It is better, one would think, to show your users something rather than a broken link.

Create an alert to inform decision makers if the outage continues past, say, one hour.