PHP in a Nutshell

Name

usleep()

Synopsis

    void usleep ( int microseconds )

The usleep() is similar to the sleep(), which pauses script execution, except that it uses microseconds (millionths of a second) for its sleep time rather than seconds. It is so named because "u" is similar in style to the Greek character Mu that is associated with "micro." It takes the amount of time to pause execution as its only parameter.

    usleep(4000000);
    echo "Done\n";

The maximum script execution time is 30 seconds by default (although you may have changed this by altering the max_execution_time setting inside php.ini), but you can use usleep() to make your scripts go on for longer than that because PHP does not have control during the sleep operation.

Warning

The use of usleep() is not advised if you want backward compatibility, because it wasn't available on Windows prior to PHP 5.