Weird PHP issue

Hello, I have the following code bellow that works fine on one VPS Cent0s 6.5 and on another Centos 6.5 with another co. the code slows down the site to a crawl. it takes 50 sec. for a page to load. Here is the code. I apologize for not being more versed in PHP in advance.

<div id="dropdown"><a href="#" class="trigger2">[x] - Close</a><br/><?php
$ddownurl = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'dropdown', true);
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $ddownurl);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 300);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 300);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
echo $data;
curl_close($ch);
?></div>

does any have any idea what this does or calls so that I may make the changes on the server. Does it call a certain php module?

Thank you kindly.