slow reading from socket

I am writing a script that connects to somekind of telnet server, and
returns the answers the server gives.

Everything works fine until I have to start writing a loop. I want to give a
command which will give an answer of more than 1 line, but I do not know how
many lines it will be in total.



So I wrote something like this:

// get the list

fputs ($fp, "list all\n");

$list = "1";

while (!$list=="") {

$list = fgets($fp, 50);

echo "$list<BR>";

}



I tried also a few other loops like "while ($i < 100) or while(!feof) etc.
but they take over 40 seconds to show 4 lines of text.



But if I would do something like:

fputs ($fp, "list all\n");

$line1 = fgets($fp, 50);

$line2 = fgets($fp, 50);

$line3 = fgets($fp, 50);

etc.



It is ready within a second. Anybody knows how I can speed this up? I
already tried other functions like fread, fpassthru, all worked, but as
evenly slow.



Who can help me out?



Thanks!

And apologies if this is a n00b question.