What are the best practices for handling external streams on a PHP server without storing them on the filesystem?

When handling external streams on a PHP server without storing them on the filesystem, it is best to use PHP's stream functions to process the data directly in memory. This can help improve performance and reduce the need for temporary storage. One approach is to use PHP's stream functions like `fopen`, `fread`, and `fclose` to read the data from the external stream and process it as needed.

// Example code to handle an external stream without storing it on the filesystem
$externalStream = fopen('http://example.com/stream', 'r');

if ($externalStream) {
    while (!feof($externalStream)) {
        $data = fread($externalStream, 1024);
        // Process the data as needed
    }

    fclose($externalStream);
}