How to check the availability of a third-party resource?

Question

PHP

Hello.
There is a script. The script accesses a third-party resource via CURL. If a third-party resource crashes or processes a request for a long time, then our script, trying to wait for a response, either crashes or "hangs", respectively.
There is an option to use CURLOPT_TIMEOUT or CURLOPT_TIMEOUT_MS. But I see no reason to send data to someone else's server if it is not available, and if it is available, then its response time will obviously be longer than the lifetime of our script.
Is it possible to somehow "ping" a third-party resource using php?

Answer 1

function ping($host,$port=80,$timeout=6)
{
        $fsock = fsockopen($host, $port, $errno, $errstr, $timeout);
        if ( ! $fsock )
        {
                return FALSE;
        }
        else
        {
                return TRUE;
        }
}