you will find that PHP doesn't do everything that you need it to do. Rather than abandon (the otherwise perfect!) PHP and search for an alternative language, it could easily be worthwhile to extend PHP to make it do what you want ...

Starting with PHP 4.3.0, it is now possible to write some pretty smart multiplexing networking applications stream_select(). The only problem is that the standard DNS functions gethostbyname() block the whole script until the domain name resolves.

Wouldn't it be nice to have an alternative method of resolving DNS that won't cause your existing sockets to time out?

We'll be using libares (written by Greg Hudson) as the basis of a PHP extension that provides such an alternative method. libares is released under an MIT license.
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Source: www.php.net