A few months ago, I needed to bring in an XML feed from another provider. This wasn't a RSS feed that I could use feeds API on but an XML with fields related to lake levels, etc. In the past, I had used the built in simplexml features in PHP 5 to do this job. The problems I had in the past were that the feed would go down for hours to days at a time. This would only serve to break my site. It seems that every time I edited my code to compensate for an error caused by the buggy feed the next time it would cause a different error.