What best practices should be followed when using cURL in PHP to prevent errors and improve performance?

When using cURL in PHP, it is important to follow best practices to prevent errors and improve performance. One common issue is not properly handling errors that may occur during the cURL request. To address this, you should check for errors using curl_errno() and curl_error() functions after making the request. Additionally, setting appropriate cURL options can help optimize performance, such as reusing the same cURL handle for multiple requests.

// Initialize cURL session
$ch = curl_init();

// Set cURL options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://api.example.com');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);

// Execute cURL request
$response = curl_exec($ch);

// Check for errors
if(curl_errno($ch)){
    echo 'cURL error: ' . curl_error($ch);
}

// Close cURL session
curl_close($ch);

// Process response data
echo $response;