I just did some quick benchmarking on this. Fetching google.com using file_get_contents took (in seconds): 2.31319094 2.30374217 2.21512604 3.30553889 2.30124092 CURL took: 0.68719101 0.64675593 0.64326 0.81983113 0.63956594 This was using the benchmark class from http://davidwalsh.name/php-timer-benchmark