php curl steam-api超级慢

I'm making a scoreboard and implementing the steam API to retrieve avatars for users. At first I was using file_get, but it was so slow! So someone suggested I use curl.

Old method

$url = 'http://www.com';
$content = file_get_contents($url);
$json = json_decode($content, true);

I then used a foreach loop to grab the items I wanted from the data.

foreach($output['response']['players'] as $item) {
}

new curl code,

$url = 'www.com';
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
echo $output = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
$json = json_decode($output, true);

I get pretty much the same result from the json method but it is a little faster. But it is still extremely slow, is there anyway to increase the speed of this? Can I load the table and then load the avatars as they become available?

Scoreboard http://fyre.site.nfoservers.com/index.php