What are the best practices for implementing time delays in PHP applications?

When implementing time delays in PHP applications, it is important to use the sleep() function to pause the execution of the script for a specified number of seconds. This can be useful for simulating real-world scenarios, such as waiting for an API response or controlling the rate of requests to a server.

// Implementing a time delay of 5 seconds
sleep(5);
echo "This message will be displayed after a 5-second delay.";