How to use curl_multi() without blocking

A more efficient implementation of curl_multi()
curl_multi is a great way to process multiple HTTP requests in parallel in PHP. curl_multi is particularly handy when working with large data sets (like fetching thousands of RSS feeds at one time). Unfortunately there is very little documentation on the best way to implement curl_multi. As a result, most of the examples around the web are either inefficient or fail entirely when asked to handle more than a few hundred requests.