On his blog today, Christian Stocker has this new post with a look at a method to grab the contents of a lot of feeds with non-blocking sockets.

blog.ch has currently more than 580 blogs in its database and the usual way with getting each feed after each other doesn't work anymore reliably, 'cause some feeds just time out or respond very slowly and take the whole process down.

There's a post by Wez about how to fetch more than one "feed" at once with non-blocking sockets. This works perfectly, but has one little drawback. We would have to implement a somehow decent HTTP header parser for all the possibilities out there...

There are some comments already, mentioning things like cURL and spawning off child processes, but surely there has to be a way to implement something simple that can handle the needed redirects and other HTTP codes...ideas? suggestions?