Messed up the end of my previous one. Corrected version here: 

a simple work around to non-blocking working with normal read is like so:

$read = array($socket);
$write  = NULL;
$except = NULL;
while(1) {
    $num_changed_sockets = socket_select($read, $write, $except, 0, 1);
    if ( $num_changed_sockets > '0' ) {
        socket_read($socket,10000,PHP_NORMAL_READ);
    } 
}