rawlist function hangs for hours and never completes on large folder - phpseclib

Question

I am retrieving a list of files in a folder with tens of thousands of files. I've let the script execute for a few hours but it never seems to progress after this part. Is there a way to diagnose what's going on or the progress of the list? It used to take a few minutes to load the list, so I am not sure why it's all of a sudden hanging now.
Code
function EchoDump($echoOut = 0)
{
if($echoOut)
echo str_repeat("<!-- Agent Smith -->", 1000);
else
return str_repeat("<!-- Agent Smith -->", 1000);
}
$sftp_connection = new Net_SFTP($website ,2222);
$login_result = $sftp_connection->login($credentials->login(), $credentials->password());
echo "<pre>Login Status: ".( $login_result ? "Success" : "Failure") ."</pre>";
if($sftp_connection->chdir($photosFolder))
echo "<pre>Changed to $photosFolder</pre>";
else
{
echo "<pre>Failed to change to $photosFolder</pre>";
}
echo "<pre>Downloading List.</pre>";
EchoDump(1);
$rawlist = $sftp_connection->rawlist();
echo "<pre>List downloaded.</pre>";
EchoDump(1);
Output
Login Status: Success
Changed to /vspfiles/photos
Downloading List.
And then it will just sit with Downloading List as the last output forever.

Answer 1

Real time logging might help provide some insight. You can enable that by adding define('NET_SSH2_LOGGING', 3); to the top of your script. Once you got that maybe post it on pastebin.org for dissection.
That said, I will say that rawlist() doesn't return directory info on demand. It'll return everything. It's not the most efficient of designs but back in phpseclib 1.0 days Iterators didn't exist. phpseclib works with PHP4 so it had to work with what it had. The current master branch requires PHP 5.6 and is under active development so maybe this behavior will change but we'll see.