You'd be better off using in_array() instead of array_search()...
If that's all it's doing then it certainly shouldn't be taking 10 seconds. Of course, I've tried following the Lycos links you've provided, and I've so far typed everything you see above, and I'm still waiting for the pages to display ... 🙂 ... still waiting.
Let's see if I can't think of another way of generating six random numbers 1..60....
🆒 - you don't need to seed PHP4.2's RNG! (Is Lycos using 4.2? Does that make a difference?)
Oops, they've both timed out - now we'll never know 🙂
No idea if it'll be faster, but
$numbers=range(1,60);
shuffle($numbers);
$numbers=array_slice($numbers,0,6);
Will have the desired effect. (Probably be a bit slower, 'cos it's gotta randomise the whole array). Dunno if the description is obsolete, but it still says you need to srand() first to get shuffle() to work.