Investigate slowness with PHP

gistfile1.txt

$ch = curl_init('http://path/to/sanfrancisco/');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$output = curl_exec($ch);
$info = curl_getinfo($ch);

$info will return an array including elements for 
total_time, 
namelookup_time, 
connect_time,
pretransfer_time, 
starttransfer_time and 
redirect_time. 

From these you should be able to work out whether it's the dns, request, the actual soap server or the response that's taking up the time.