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phpcachingfile-get-contentsfault-tolerance

Fault-tolerant file_get_contents

I have a website with the following architecture:

End user     --->    Server A (PHP)        --->        Server B (ASP.NET & Database)
             web                    file_get_contents
           browser

Server A is a simple web server, mostly serving static HTML pages. However, some content is dynamic, and this content is fetched from Server B. Example:

someDynamicPageOnServerA.php:
<html>
     ...static stuff...

     <?php echo file_get_contents("http://serverB/somePage.aspx?someParameter"); ?>

     ...more static stuff...
</html>

This works fine. However, if server B is down (maintainance, unexpected crash, etc.), those dynamic pages on server A will fail. Thus, I'd like to

  • cache the last result of file_get_contents and
  • show this result if file_get_contents timeouted.

Now, it shouldn't be too hard to implement something like this; however, this seems to be a common scenario and I'd like to avoid re-inventing the wheel. Is there some PHP library or built-in feature that helps which such a scenario?

Solution

  • i would do something like this:

    function GetServerStatus($site, $port){
    $fp = @fsockopen($site, $port, $errno, $errstr, 2);
    if (!$fp) {
       return false;
    } else { 
       return true;
    }
}

$tempfile = '/some/temp/file/path.txt';

if(GetServerStatus('ServerB',80)){
     $content = file_get_contents("http://serverB/somePage.aspx?someParameter");
     file_put_contents($tempfile,$content);
     echo $content;
}else{
     echo file_get_contents($tempfile);
}