[PHP4] gettimeofday()

hi, i've been testing out the performance of php4 with apache and odbc driver (oob by easysoft.com) using gettimeofday() to find the amount of elapsed time... i'm running php4.0.1pl2 on redhat 6.2 with apache 1.3.12. the problem that i'm having is that gettimeofday seems to return time that "jumps backwards in time." here's an example of what i would get when i write a for loop to grab the current time ten thousand times: time: 965666189.9983 time: 965666189.99903 time: 965666189.99976 time: 965666181.00049 ********** time: 965666181.00123 time: 965666181.00197 note that this does not happen all the time... i would say in 10,000 times, this happens about 5 times or so. also note that strange enough, it always seems to jump backwards 9 seconds percisely... *boggle* i wrote a small program in c to test the <sys/time.h> gettimeofday() function to make sure that it's not a hardware issue, and it's not. :) does any one know if this is a problem with apache, php, or a combination of the two? is this a bug or is it due to some "smart forking" that php does to optimize for loops? thanx in advance for any help! attached is the program i wrote for testing: <?php function getCurrentTime () { $time_array = gettimeofday(); return $time_array["sec"] + ($time_array["usec"]/100000); } $cache_time = 0; $cur_time = 0; echo "test starts..."; for ($i=0; $i<10000; $i++) { $cur_time = getCurrentTime(); echo "<br>time: $cur_time"; if ($cur_time < $cache_time) { //if time starts going backwards echo " **********"; } $cache_time = $cur_time; } ?> ---------------- remco chang bountyquest.com