I've been having a bit of trouble downloading a large number of files from a remove server via http at the kind of speed I need. In this situation I need to get images, up to 250 groups of up to 36 images (usually less). I've tried both using get_file_contents and copy(), both work but are slow, in a single run of 20 group it tikes minutes, when all is said and done this will have to be run for 200 sets, of up to 200 groups, of up to 36 images.
Is there any speedier ways to download that many images using PHP?
If you're on a *nix server, try using a call to wget instead of calling get_file_contents/copy as I would think this would be a more efficient way of downloading the images (just guessing here).
As mentioned in the comments, it could also be a bandwidth issue from either your server or from the remote server. These are out of the scope of stackoverflow and you would be better posting on serverfault