So are we (confused). You should probably do that standard work that you should always do when you run into a problem:

Take the code that produces the problem and reduce it to a minimal example that reproduces the problem. You will likely discover the source of the problem when doing this. If you don't find the solution, then post exactly the very small script that reproduces the problem along with the exact input, output (including error messages), and what about the output you didn't like.

I tried both of your code structures, and they both worked fine, stopping after $sitesperpage fetches from the database. I wonder if there is a bug in the actual code that isn't reflected in the posted code. Perhaps a mispelled variable name or something like that? Are you using -w and use strict?

O well. Maybe I fixed my error in typing it. I no longer have the original code. But that loop took down apache. (Each iteration of the loop I was pushing
some results to a list.) Apache's logs show it died due to malloc failing. I'm using both -w and use strict, so that's not the problem.

"Sometimes it's hard to tell the dancer from the dance."-Corwin in CoC