What is a practical use for PHP's sleep()?

php function sleep usleep
alex picture alex · Oct 14, 2010 · Viewed 24.8k times · Source

I just had a look at the docs on sleep().

Where would you use this function?

Is it there to give the CPU a break in an expensive function?

Any common pitfalls?

Answer

codaddict picture codaddict · Oct 14, 2010

One place where it finds use is to create a delay.

Lets say you've built a crawler that uses curl/file_get_contents to get remote pages. Now you don't want to bombard the remote server with too many requests in short time. So you introduce a delay between consecutive requests.

sleep takes the argument in seconds, its friend usleep takes arguments in microseconds and is more suitable in some cases.

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