Using --with-curl and "libcurl 7.8 (SSL 0.9.5)":

If you use the following function with a url that pings, but does not answer, it will die.  I have a script set up to continue for timeouts, but it does not continue, it dies.  If you change CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER to 0, it will not die, but also does not return the data in a variable as I need it to.

I would give you a url to try, but chances are that it will be back up by the time you get to this.  This works *fine* for sites not found, pages not found, dns errors, timeouts, etc.  It is only a problem if the computer is in the DNS records but does not respond (to ping).

function get_data($url, $timeout=15) {

        $timeout = (int)$timeout;
        $ch = curl_init ();
        curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
        curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_MUTE, 0);
        curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $timeout);
        curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_NOBODY, 0);
        curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
        curl_setopt ($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

        $page = curl_exec ($ch);
        #print curl_error($ch);
        #print "<br>";
        #print "page: $page";
        #$i = curl_getinfo($ch);
        #print_r($i);
        curl_close ($ch);

        return trim($page);
}

 './configure' '--with-apxs=/usr/sbin/apxs' '--prefix=/usr' '-with-config-file-path=/etc/httpd' '-enable-safe-mode' '--with-exec-dir=/usr/bin' '--with-system-regex' '--disable-debug' '--with-zlib' '-enable-debugger' '--enable-track-vars' '--enable-ftp' '--enable-wddx' '--with-gdbm' '--with-mysql=/usr' '--with-pgsql' '--with-xml' '--with-curl=/usr/local'