SimpleXMLElement slow performance

Question

I am using SimpleXMLElement() to obtain data from a website, which is used to embed data. The code I am using is as follows:

$rss = new SimpleXMLElement('http://eliteprospects.com/rss_player_stats2.php?player='.$player_array[0]['embed_stats'], null, true);
foreach($rss->xpath('channel/item') as $item)
{
     echo  utf8_decode($item->description);
}

This works great, except for one issue, the data loads exceptionally slow from the other site. The page load goes from approximately 0.5-1s to 2.5-3s.

Is there a method that I can use, to load the asynchronously, or is there a faster function I should be using instead?

An idea that came to mind was to load a separate page within an iFrame after the initial page load, or is there a better method?

Answer 1

Is there a method that I can use, to load the asynchronously, or is there a faster function I should be using instead?

Unfortunately, there is nothing to do about the long response time (trivially assuming that connection speed in not archaic). Also echoing out the results all at once might slow down the browser rendering and thus the page load time.

AJAX fits nicely here - wait for window.onload and trigger the AJAX call to your webservice (holds the snippet from question) to prepare the output buffer and return the response to browser. Afterwards set/replace the innerHTML value of selected DOM element with the response.responseText.

Pseudo-code

window.onload = function()
{
    var url = 'http://example.com/webserice';

    Ajax.get(url, function(response)
    {
        var responseText = response.responseText;

        document.getElementById('someid').innerHTML = responseText;
    }  
}

The snippet I am using in pure JS, although jQuery has a lot more appealing way to do it

Ajax = { 

    request : {},

    createRequest : function()
    {
        var request = false;

        if (window.XMLHttpRequest)
        {
            request = new XMLHttpRequest();
        }
        else
        {
            if (window.ActiveXObject)
            {
                request = new ActiveXObject('MSXML2.XMLHTTP.3.0');
            }
            else
            {
                request = false;
            }
        }

        return request;
    },

    get : function(page, callback)
    {
        var self = this;
        var request = this.createRequest();

        if (! page)
        {
            return false;
        }

        request.onreadystatechange = function()
        {
            if (request.readyState == 4 && request.status == 200)
            {
                delete self.request;

                if (typeof callback == 'function')
                {
                    callback(request);
                }
                else
                {
                    self.update(request, callback);
                }

                var regex = /<script\b.*?>([\s\S]*?)<\/scri/ig;
                var match;
                while (match = regex.exec(request.responseText))
                {
                    eval(match[1]);
                }
            }
        }

        request.open('GET', page, true);
        request.setRequestHeader('X-Requested-With', 'ajax');
        request.send(null);
    }
}