I don't do php at all, but the current joinUO poller runs as a windows service. I think you want to be really cautious about opening a connection to your shard on every request though.

I'm working on an API that can provide more frequent updates and integrate with your website, the beginnings of this are here: http://api.joinuo.com

I'll provide more information when the integration components are available.


One note about ping though, it's not a very useful statistic in my option, as it only provides the ping between the website and the shard, which are usually hosted very close to eachother.

Maybe you can use JavaScript to have the client's web browser ping the shard?