Facebook Friends Count?

What is the best way to count a Facebook user's friends...

I'm currently using (PHP):

$data = $facebook-开发者_如何学C>api('/me/friends');
$friends_count = count($data['data']);

and its very slow... (about 2 secs)

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Querying the facebook api sends a request to facebook. Because its a common http-request this Probably takes most of the time. There is usually no way around it. If you need the values more often, you should cache them somewhere

if (file_exists($cacheFile)) {
  $data = file_get_contents($cachefile);
} else {
  $data = $facebook->api('/me/friends');
  file_put_contents($cacheFile, $data);
}
$friends_count = count($data['data']);

Remember to update the cache file from time to time.

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If you are not processing the data given by Facebook on server side, instead of doing it using PHP, you can use JavaScript graph API to fetch, it can fetch it using ajax which wont effect your page load time.