I have restarted the Apache web server and then the microtime function worked correctly in this situation a few times. Then it started to produce the same bogus data often. Now the original problem is right here again. Same place. Only the approximately 100th of like 200 times it is called. Instead of 1298064639.9228 (or similar) as everywhere else on the page it returns values around 1296908080.167 or 1296908081.2987. Quite a bit off but relatively "constant".

The seconds part of the return value seems to be my system boot time. I have now restarted the computer and the value points to that time. The fractional part is kind of oscillating around similar values. It's going up and down a bit every time but it has the tendency to decrease slowly. I have discovered a few other places in my application where it happens. But it's always the same database function. The same code.

$start0 = microtime(true);
$start = microtime(true);
if (abs($start - $start0) > 1)
{
	var_dump($start0);
	var_dump($start);
}

This should never print something but it does. Here are a few examples:

float(1298065510.0493) float(1298068208.1106)
float(1298065510.0533) float(1298068218.7475)
float(1298065510.0405) float(1298068225.1549)
float(1298065510.038) float(1298068231.7615)
float(1298065510.0269) float(1298068237.0667)
float(1298065510.0234) float(1298068244.8534)
float(1298065510.0266) float(1298068250.9826)
float(1298065510.0145) float(1298068257.6404)
float(1298065510.8087) float(1298068265.3026)
float(1298065510.809) float(1298068271.1601)
float(1298065510.8087) float(1298068277.0327)
float(1298065510.8029) float(1298068284.6319)
...

There is a simpler test case :

for ($i=0 ; $i<=100000 ; $i++)
{
   $mt = microtime(true);
   if(isset($last) && $mt<$last)
       echo 'Last:'.$last.' - Current:'.$mt."\n";
   $last = $mt;
}


On Windows XP, PHP 5.3.5, I get outputs that looks like :

Last:1307620010.9549 - Current:1307620010.0533
Last:1307620010.9742 - Current:1307620010.0689
Last:1307620010.9742 - Current:1307620010.0689
Last:1307620010.983 - Current:1307620010.0845
Last:1307620010.9909 - Current:1307620010.0845
Last:1307620011.0142 - Current:1307620010.1158
Last:1307620011.0612 - Current:1307620010.147
Last:1307620011.0679 - Current:1307620010.1626
Last:1307620011.0865 - Current:1307620010.1783
Last:1307620011.115 - Current:1307620010.2095

Duplicate of bug #64370

Wow, that was fast. Why was the other bug picked up to quickly? Where this thing is around for years and doing unimaginable damage...

Could somebody with sufficient access please tell the other bug that this is NOT limited to PHP 5.5 (as he emphasised many times) but also happened much earlier?