If the page you're fetching is largish, reading it in 100 byte chunks and building it up by repeated concatentation:

    while ($data)
    {
        recv(SK_CLIENT, $data, 100, 0);
        $thePage .= $data;
    }
[download]

could be a part of your problem. Something like

1 while read( SK_CLIENT, $thePage, 4096, length( $thePage ) );
[download]

might run a little more quickly.

Better still might be to read the first few lines of the response line by line and look for the Content-length header, and then read the rest in one go.