PHP curl loop terminates early after 5th Iteration - php

Question

this is an issue I've run into before using curl. We do a mass data import at the beginning of the day for and part of that is geocoding some addresses. We use google's API to do this, so a simple curl loop (should) work, at least that's what I thought.
Here are my two functions: Note that the properties variable contains about 100 entries. However, no matter how many times I refresh, the loop always stops calling the curl function after the 5th iteration. Note that the loop does not terminate, only the call to the curl function appears to be lost.
function geocode()
{
$service_url = 'https://maps.googleapis.com/maps/api/geocode/json?key=' . GAPI_KEY . '&address=';
$properties = $this->listing_model->get_non_geocoded();
if ($properties) {
foreach ($properties->result() as $property) {
$service_url .= urlencode($property->address . "," . $property->city . "," . $property->state . " " . $property->zip);
try {
$search = $this->curl($service_url);
} catch (Exception $e) {
var_dump($e);
}
}
}
}
function curl($url)
{
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
unset($ch);
return $result;
}
And of course the var dumps:
...previous (first) 3 entries...
string '14' (length=2)
object(stdClass)[116]
public 'lat' => float #######
public 'lng' => float #######
string '15' (length=2)
object(stdClass)[131]
public 'lat' => float #######
public 'lng' => float #######
string '16' (length=2)
null <-- ? Should be from curl
string '17' (length=2)
null <-- ? Should be from curl
string '18' (length=2)
null <-- ? Should be from curl
string '19' (length=2)
null <-- ? Should be from curl

Answer 1

According to the API's documentation found here: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding/, it looks like you can only do five calls a second with a total of 2500 requests per day.
So now, I think your question is how to properly handle the rate limit and it looks like there are some good ideas here: How to manage request limited API calls
(Keeping track of every request, sleeping between every set of five requests, etc.)
Best of luck!
EDIT: Sorry! Didn't see that you had it solved. Figured that since the limit on the API was five and your loop was failing every five iterations, there was a correlation.