it is a bad idea to use sleep() for delayed output effects as



1) you have to flush() output before you sleep



2) depending on your setup flush() will not work all the way to the browser as the web server might apply buffering of its own or the browser might not render output it thinks not to be complete



netscape for example will only display complete lines and will not show table parts until the </table> tag arrived



so use sleep if you have to wait for events and don't want to burn to much cycles, but don't use it for silly delayed output effects!