title: get_browser slowing down page load, any alternative?
body: <p>I have used PHP's <code>get_browser</code> function for quite some time now and have never really noticed any lag on any of my websites. However, recently I noticed that one of my sites was taking a second or so more to load at the server end than it should take. I commented out the <code>get_browser</code> function and the page loaded instantly.</p>
  
  <p>Could this be to do with my server or is the <code>get_browser</code> function known to be slow? The website is the only website I have that is running on a windows server, could this be the issue? Or could this be to do with my browscap.ini file (this is updated everyday from <a href="http://browsers.garykeith.com" rel="nofollow">http://browsers.garykeith.com</a>)?</p>
  
  <p>If there is nothing I can do to speed up the <code>get_browser</code> function, are there any alternatives to it? I need to reliably collect the following information about the browser:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>What browser it is, i.e. Chrome, IE, Safari etc</li>
  <li>What version it is (in full), i.e 10.1 etc</li>
  <li>Whether it is a crawler or a bot</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I am not aware of any other methods of gathering this information from the user agent, would it be better to use javascript (I would rather not as I need the values server side)?</p>