Sending 5000 push notifications at same time, keep the connection to apple open?

Right now I'm using the following piece of code to send my push notifications

function applePush($deviceToken,$sound,$message,$object,$thread = 0)
{
$passphrase = 'Secret';


        $ctx = stream_context_create();
        stream_context_set_option($ctx, 'ssl', 'local_cert', 'secret.pem');
        stream_context_set_option($ctx, 'ssl', 'passphrase', $passphrase);

        // Open a connection to the APNS server
        $fp = stream_socket_client(
            'ssl://gateway.push.apple.com:2195', $err,
            $errstr, 60, STREAM_CLIENT_CONNECT|STREAM_CLIENT_PERSISTENT, $ctx);

        if (!$fp)
            exit("Failed to connect: $err $errstr" . PHP_EOL);

        //Customizable sounds
        if ($sound == 0) { $sound = 'default'; }
        else {$sound = '/' . $sound . '.wav'; }         

        // Create the payload body
        if ($thread > 0)
            {

                    $body['aps'] = array(
                        'alert' => $message,
                        'sound' => $sound,
                        'obj' => $object,
                        't' => $thread,
                        );

            }
        else
            {
                    $body['aps'] = array(
                        'alert' => $message,
                        'sound' => $sound,
                        'obj' => $object
                        );

            }   


        // Encode the payload as JSON
        $payload = json_encode($body);

        // Build the binary notification
        $msg = chr(0) . pack('n', 32) . pack('H*', $deviceToken) . pack('n', strlen($payload)) . $payload;

        // Send it to the server
        $result = fwrite($fp, $msg, strlen($msg));


        // Close the connection to the server
        fclose($fp);

}

What I am in essence doing is: 1) Pulling 5000 (and growing) device token's from an SQL database.
2) Using a PHP loop, for each device token I run the above listed applePush function

Now this works just fine and everyone is getting the push from apple. Now the kicker is that, my own personal iphone was the first device in my SQL database, and I would get the push notification instantly. BUT, I just bought a new iphone and I am the last device in the database now, and I notice it takes me almost 30 minutes to get the notificaions now. I am thinking this has to do with the physical time to make all those connections to apple, but the time it gets to the 5000th device ID, 30 minutes has lapsed.

This got me reading and it seems that Apple actually suggests keeping a connection open to APNS instead of opening and closing connections constantly.

So I write to get everyones opinion on this, am I doing this all wrong? And if I am, how can I modify my code to get it inline with apple policy and make it faster/more efficient

Thank you!