Sleep for milliseconds in PHP

How to make PHP sleep for milliseconds rather than seconds.

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By. Jacob

Edited: 2021-03-07 17:25

There is no native PHP function to sleep for milliseconds, and you also can not use fractional values in the sleep function, so you will instead need to create your own function; you can do that using usleep, which is a build-in function in PHP used to sleep for microseconds.

To arrive at the milliseconds you multiply with 1000:

function m_sleep($milliseconds) {
  return usleep($milliseconds * 1000); // Microseconds->milliseconds
}

Multiplying by another 1000 will get you to seconds:

return usleep($seconds * 1000 * 1000); // Microseconds->milliseconds->seconds

Not that this is needed, since you already got the sleep() function for sleeping for seconds — so try staying with milliseconds for now.

To make things easier, you can create a function that you can call as needed:

m_sleep(5000); // 5000 milliseconds = 5 seconds

function m_sleep($milliseconds) {
  return usleep($milliseconds * 1000); // Microseconds->milliseconds
}

echo "Start\n\n";

m_sleep(500); // 500 milliseconds = 0.5 seconds

echo "0.5 seconds has now passed. Exiting.";
exit();