Recently I encountered an issue where a task contained a loop. It would make many requests to a third-party API endpoint. Within the documentation of this , like many others, was a rate limit of 2 requests per second. CRON API Previous we had a solution that looked something like this, which I have seen in a lot of other places: } foreach ( $productVariants as $variant ) { sleep( 2 ); // avoid rate limit sendRequestToAPI( $variant ->id); Very simple, pause for an adequate amount of time ﻿to avoid hitting the rate limit. Sometimes such operations might have a loop that iterates over a dataset that could contain tens of thousands of entries. It already takes a long time to run, so every wasted millisecond can add up and can make a script longer than it needs to be. A waster half second over a thousand products is eight minutes! So one could appreciate how this could snowball. With a few adjustments, you can simply have the script wait a much more precise amount of time. Still keeping under the rate limit, but also not wasting any more time than necessary. foreach($productVariants as $variant) { $elapsedTime = microtime(true) - $timeStart; }

    $timeStart = microtime(true);

    sendRequestToAPI($variant->id);
} $timeBetweenEachRequest = 2 ; if (isset($timeStart)) { $ remainingTime = $timeBetweenEachRequest - $elapsedTime; sleep($ remainingTime * 1000000); // Convert seconds to microseconds In the example above we simply time how long the loop took to run, and wait the remaining amount of time necessary. ﻿By simply subtracting the time already spent executing the logic within the loop already, we avoid wasted time whilst still being safe from hitting our limits. I hope this little snippet helps someone out there. The lead image for this article was generated by HackerNoon's AI Image Generator via the prompt "software development".

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