If you are using fsockopen() to create a connection, first going to write into the stream and then waiting for the reply (e.g. simulating HTTP request with some extra headers), then stream_set_timeout() must be set only after the write - if it is before write, it has no effect on the read timeout :-(
If you are using fsockopen() to create a connection, first going to write into the stream and then waiting for the reply (e.g. simulating HTTP request with some extra headers), then stream_set_timeout() must be set only after the write - if it is before write, it has no effect on the read timeout :-(