CloudSight Response Speed

Question

I am experimenting with the Cloudsight API (Image recognition) and am seeing speed issues in response time. Their website advertises a 6-12 second response time, but I am routinely seeing responses taking up to and well over 20 seconds.

I would like to know if this is something on CloudSights end and that is just the response time, or if my code is causing these delays by being unoptimized or doing unnecessary work.

The following is my PHP code, it works fully, I can upload an image and read/display the response. My HTML code is a simple form that calls this PHP file.

<?php

$filename = $_FILES['fileToUpload']['name'];
$filedata = $_FILES['fileToUpload']['tmp_name'];
$filesize = $_FILES['fileToUpload']['size'];
$filetype = $_FILES['fileToUpload']['type'];

/*$tmpfile = $_FILES['fileToUpload']['tmp_name'];
$filename = basename($_FILES['fileToUpload']['name']);*/

$ch = curl_init("https://api.cloudsightapi.com/image_requests");
//$ch = curl_init("http://requestb.in/131zwlo1");

$postFields = [
    "image_request[locale]" => "en-US",
    "image_request[language]" => "en-US",
    "image_request[image]" => "@$filedata".";filename=@$filename".";type=@$filetype"
];

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $postFields);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("Authorization: CloudSight [key]", "Content-Type:multipart/form-data"));

$result = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

$result = json_decode($result, true);
$token = $result['token'];
$status = $result['status'];

sleep(3);

while($status == "not completed"){
    sleep(1);
    $cht = curl_init("http://api.cloudsightapi.com/image_responses/$token");
    curl_setopt($cht, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
    curl_setopt($cht, CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER, array("Authorization: CloudSight 6-j8FTD-h1ZtnlYgacdSEQ"));

    $result = curl_exec($cht);
    curl_close($cht);

    $result = json_decode($result, true);
    $status = $result['status'];
};

$name = $result['name'];
$reason = $result['reason'];
if($name != ""){
    echo "\nName: $name";
};

if($reason != ""){
    echo "\nReason Skipped: $reason";
};

?>