As Thomas Habets posted on it’s blog (http://blog.habets.pp.se/2010/09/gettimeofday-should-never-be-used-to-measure-time): gettimeofday() and time() should only be used to get the current time if the current wall-clock time is actually what you want. They should never be used to measure time or schedule an event X time into the future.

And because the time() and microtime() function relies on gettimeofday(), those functions don’t provide a reliable way to measure script execution time. The main issue comes from the fact that changing the server date/time directly affects the return value of these functions. As many servers rely on an NTP server to automatically adjust their time, the developers can be easily miss-leaded by some incorrect calculations due to automatically time adjustments.