This may not be an optimal solution, but it should be pretty easy to change if you need to – change the function to take another arguments (e.g. $params, an array) and replace line 16 with something like

$out .= http_build_query($params);

function backgroundPost($url){
$parts=parse_url($url);

$fp = fsockopen(’ssl://’.$parts['host'],
isset($parts['port'])?$parts['port']:443,
$errno, $errstr, 30);

if (!$fp) {
return false;
} else {
$out = “POST “.$parts['path'].” HTTP/1.1\r\n”;
$out.= “Host: “.$parts['host'].”\r\n”;
$out.= “Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded\r\n”;
$out.= “Content-Length: “.strlen($parts['query']).”\r\n”;
$out.= “Connection: Close\r\n\r\n”;
if (isset($parts['query'])) $out.= $parts['query'];

fwrite($fp, $out);
fclose($fp);
return true;
}
}

Thanks to Whiteshadow for a great idea and all of the follow up!

When it rears its ugly head it’s simply a hang – or unexpected delay – which can be really difficult to trace. It bears thinking about while building an application.

I’d asked on the GMaps API group re how Google seems to solve that, and the answer I got was that the limit is per-server; you may have noticed that Google employs several server addr’s (MT1, MT2, etc.) to help solve it. Which makes sense but which not all of us can do.

Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Reason: You’re speaking plain HTTP to an SSL-enabled server port.
Instead use the HTTPS scheme to access this URL, please.

Hint: https://dev.quote2bill.com/

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I suspected it had something to do with that and had already changed the port number. Any idea what else needs to be changed in the request? Thanks.