[nubs]

Slightly off topic, but I wanted to clear this up:

> The guy uses PHP and instead of built-in HTTPRequest he uses curl to make a request

HTTPRequest is not built-in to PHP. It is a PECL extension that is usually installed separately from PHP.

Curl is more built-in to PHP - it's a PHP compile-time flag, and it is distributed with PHP source.

[acqq]

So the best approach for the given problem (just send the request, fetch the response, without too much overhead) seems to be using something a bit lower level:

http://at2.php.net/stream_socket_client