PHP curl_multi_getcontent returns null

Question

I have been following this tutorial on how to use curl_multi. http://arguments.callee.info/2010/02/21/multiple-curl-requests-with-php/

I can't tell what I am doing wrong, but curl_multi_getcontent is returning null. It is suppose to return JSON. I know it is not the mysql call as I had it working with a while loop and standard curl_exec, but The page was taking too long to load. (I've changed some of the setopt details for security)

Relevant PHP Code snippet. I do close the while loop in the end.

$i = 0;
$ch = array();
$mh = curl_multi_init();
while($row = $result->fetch_object()){
   $ch[$i] = curl_init();
   curl_setopt($ch[$i], CURLOPT_CAINFO, 'cacert.pem');
   curl_setopt($ch[$i], CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
   curl_setopt($ch[$i], CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); 
   curl_setopt($ch[$i], CURLOPT_URL, 'https://mysite.com/search/'.$row->username.'/');
   curl_multi_add_handle($mh, $ch[$i]);
   $i++;
}
$running = 0;
do {
    curl_multi_exec($mh, $running);
} while ($running > 0);
$result->data_seek(0);
$i = 0;
while ($row = $result->fetch_object()) {
    $data = curl_multi_getcontent($ch[$i]);
    $json_data = json_decode($data);
    var_dump($json_data);

EDIT

Here is the code that currently works, but causes the page to load too slowly

$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CAINFO, 'cacert.pem');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERPWD, "$username:$password");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true); 
while($row = $result->fetch_object()){
   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://mysite.com/search/'.$row->username.'/');
   $data = curl_exec($ch);
   $json_data = json_decode($data);
   var_dump($json_data);
}

Answer 1

I'm wondering:

$i = 0;
while ($row = $result->fetch_object()) {
    $data = curl_multi_getcontent($ch[$i]);
    $json_data = json_decode($data);
    var_dump($json_data);

Are you forgetting to increment $i? If so, you already grabbed the content for $ch[0], and then you call curl_multi_getcontent again.

Also, I've written a blog post covering concurrent requests with PHP's cURL extension, and it contains a general function for curl multi requests. You could call this function in the following manner:

$responses = multi([
    $requests = [
        ['url' => 'https://example.com/search/username1/'],
        ['url' => 'https://example.com/search/username2/'],
        ['url' => 'https://example.com/search/username3/']
    ]
    $opts = [
        CURLOPT_CAINFO => 'cacert.pem',
        CURLOPT_USERPWD => "username:password"
    ]
]);

Then, you cycle through the responses array:

foreach ($responses as $response) {
    if ($response['error']) {
        // handle error
        continue;
    }
    // check for empty response
    if ($response['data'] === null) {
        // examine $response['info']
        continue;
    }
    // handle data
    $data = json_decode($response['data']);
    // do something
}

Using this function, you could make a simple test of accessing https sites using the following call:

multi(
    $requests = [
        'google' => ['url' => 'https://www.google.com'],
        'linkedin' => ['url'=> 'https://www.linkedin.com/']
    ],
    $opts = [
        CURLOPT_CAINFO => '/path/to/your/cacert.pem',
        CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER => true
    ]
);