Defer for php

[Gemini23]

I have a php script that brings in a search box (and results) from an external website... a problem arises when the external website is down for maintenance and my website takes 'forever' to load while it is waiting for the php script... (which won't run) is there a 'defer' equivalent for php so that the page will at least load without the search box php query

Any suggestions on how to resolve this?

[enigma1]

If you're connecting say with fsockopen or curl you can specify a timeout for the request. If you don't specify anything the default is something like 30secs. So you could change it to be few secs instead.

[incrediBILL]

Another thought might be to put this content in an iframe, so then your page load speed would seem snappy and their content, however slow or even a timeout, wouldn't impact the rest of your page.

[Gemini23]

But surely iFrames are not good with search engines?

[incrediBILL]

You said it was a search box from an external website, so I assumed that content wasn't your actual content and having it indexed opposed to pages load speed wasn't a primary concern. If I'm wrong, then other timeout limiting solutions listed above would probably work better but page load time will always be a concern. Besides, these aren't your dads search engines, they can handle frame content unlike back in the day, but it's still not optimal results.

More importantly, aren't you concerned with dupe content by including a 3rd party sites search results or are the search results directly derived from your site?

[Gemini23]

Thanks incrediBill.. the off-site content is taylored for my site and comes from a database... the alternative is to bring the content in via xml... every day and usually in the early hours of the morning in my time zone (but we sell world-wide)the php content goes off-line for a minute or two... but becoming more frequently is an extended period of being off-line which then slows down the loading of my site considerably.

[Gemini23]

Thanks incrediBill.. the off-site content is taylored for my site and comes from a database... the alternative is to bring the content in via xml... every day and usually in the early hours of the morning in my time zone (but we sell world-wide)the php content goes off-line for a minute or two... but becoming more frequently is an extended period of being off-line which then slows down the loading of my site considerably.

[Gemini23]

Could an "Object" be used to contain this php external content? and would that then load AFTER the page load?