Throttling / Rate Limiting in PHP

Question

I'm using Amazon Product Advertising API which has a limit of 1 query per second. I found this library which seems to do what I want, but its a bit of an overkill for my requirement.

Is there a simpler way to rate limit (I'm calling a function) without using any libraries, besides using sleep because it would sleep for 1 second and the amount of requests I need to make, I should save each second.

$array = range(1,100);

foreach ($array as $value) {
    $timestamp = time();
    if ($timestamp != time()) {
        echo "\n value: ".$value." ".$timestamp;
    } else {
        usleep(1000000);
        echo "\n value: ".$value." ".$timestamp;
    }
}

Answer 1

Loop through your list of queries but on each loop get a unix timestamp (counts in seconds) and only send the query if the timestamp is higher than the last time you sent a query, then record the time stamp for checking in the next loop.

If your aim is to ensure that you don't send more that once a second but you don't want to waist seconds then a loop is probaly better than the if so:

foreach ($array as $value) {
  $timestamp = time();
  while ($timestamp == time()) { 
   continue;
  } 
  doYourThing();
}

so the script will loop through your list but for each item in the list it will continue spinning through the while loop until the second ticks over when it will execute your command and go straight into your next item.