The following code does not work:

$f = fopen("http://somewhere.blah.com/", "r");
fclose($f);
$f2 = fopen("http://somewhere.blah.com/", "r");
fclose($f2);

However, the following does work:

$f = fopen("http://somewhere.blah.com/", "r");
$f2 = fopen("http://somewhere.blah.com/", "r");

We have applied the fopen_wrappers.c patch.