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

Question

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

Answer 1

Here's a snippet of how I use sleep in one of my projects:

foreach($addresses as $address)
{
  $url = "http://maps.google.com/maps/geo?q={$address}&output=json...etc...";
  $result = file_get_contents($url);
  $geo = json_decode($result, TRUE);

  // Do stuff with $geo

  sleep(1);
}

In this case sleep helps me prevent being blocked by Google maps, because I am sending too many requests to the server.