Question

I have a script which runs in a ‘while‘ cycle. I need to determine for how long the script was running for and if it is over 10 seconds terminate it. The code I wrote returns weird decimal values (one second it might be ‘5.342…’ and other it might be ‘903.322…’).
Can someone tell me how can I achieve that?

$timer = microtime(false);
while(/*...*/)
{
   $currTime = microtime(false);
   $timeDiff = $currTime - $timer;
   $timeDiff *= 1000;

   if ($timeDiff > 10)
   {
      //...
   }
}

Answer 1

You’re tracking microseconds. If you want to see only the seconds, round it
up using round() or ceil().

You might also consider set_time_limit(), which controls how long the script is allowed to run for.

set_time_limit(10); // allow ten seconds for this script to finish

You can use register_shutdown_function() to handle any cleanup that is necessary if the script didn’t finish in time.