I was having issues with my WordPress installation running very slow.  In addition there were problems when sending updating from my mobile device.  It took me a minute to note that things were working just fine until I installed the Facebook plugin.  A bit of digging on the ‘net revealed that curl “might” needed, however I didn’t really find anything in the documentation that would suggest otherwise.  I was able to fix this problem on my Debian server by installing a few new packages.

$ sudo apt-get install curl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev php5-curl

After everything installs, restart Apache.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Now the Facebook plugin is playing nicely within WordPress.