[acqq]

I just guess, but maybe the things missing in the stack trace (marked with ?? -- maybe you miss some debug symbols?) do what is described in the manual entry I've quoted (calling global init which calls ares?).

And why curl at all? PHP has built in HTTPRequest?

[ZoF]

HTTPRequest isn't technically built in to PHP.

I agree that they aren't using the correct technology for their use case though.

[acqq]

Yes, being a C programmer I knew curl is overkill, but not what's the best lightwieght alternative, now I believe it's:

http://at2.php.net/stream_socket_client