Calling restful web services efficiently
I think its the API, I've just benchmarked it using

$json = file_get_contents('http://demo.4ds.com/rema/1.1/rules/origins/b2c.json');
$data = json_decode($json);


I only ran 10 attempts but they seem to take between 1 and 5 seconds each.

php test.php  0.03s user 0.01s system 2% cpu 1.574 total
php test.php  0.03s user 0.01s system 1% cpu 3.303 total
php test.php  0.04s user 0.01s system 0% cpu 5.881 total
php test.php  0.04s user 0.01s system 2% cpu 1.646 total
php test.php  0.03s user 0.01s system 2% cpu 1.478 total
php test.php  0.03s user 0.01s system 2% cpu 1.516 total
php test.php  0.03s user 0.01s system 2% cpu 1.590 total
php test.php  0.04s user 0.01s system 1% cpu 3.659 total
php test.php  0.03s user 0.01s system 1% cpu 3.582 total
php test.php  0.03s user 0.01s system 2% cpu 1.526 total