Sleep function question

I have one plugin that automatically creates many articles and publishes them in a short time. Because of that, there is some burden to the web server. It works based on loop that each loop it creates 1 article. The result is that my website was suspended from server. (Luckily finally it is up again)

Can i put the sleep(5) inside the loop, so that an article is created in every 5 seconds? I have tested and see that it works, but i don’t know whether the server will be less burden with this method

Any advice is very much appreciated!