Can I read a remote file contents from an iRule?

I completely revisited this yesterday afternoon and seeing as all we were wanting to do was throttle the availability of a URL depending on how busy a specific server is, we have used a health monitor to check for an open/closed flag within a file on the server and then mark the specified pool member down in the health pool, this leaves the other traffic unaffected.

The previous version using sessions and cronjobs etc etc was quite CPU hungry on our production environment, even on a quiet day where as this one seems to be un-noticable on the Dashboard graph.