How to limit execution time of a function call in

Question

There is a socket related function call in my code, that function is from another module thus out of my control, the problem is that it blocks for hours occasionally, which is totally unacceptable, How can I limit the function execution time from my code? I guess the solution must utilize another thread.

Answer 1

You don't have to use threads. You can use another process to do the blocking work, for instance, maybe using the subprocess module. If you want to share data structures between different parts of your program then Twisted is a great library for giving yourself control of this, and I'd recommend it if you care about blocking and expect to have this trouble a lot. The bad news with Twisted is you have to rewrite your code to avoid any blocking, and there is a fair learning curve.

You can use threads to avoid blocking, but I'd regard this as a last resort, since it exposes you to a whole world of pain. Read a good book on concurrency before even thinking about using threads in production, e.g. Jean Bacon's "Concurrent Systems". I work with a bunch of people who do really cool high performance stuff with threads, and we don't introduce threads into projects unless we really need them.

Answer 2

I prefer a context manager approach because it allows the execution of multiple python statements within a with time_limit statement. Because windows system does not have SIGALARM, a more portable and perhaps more straightforward method could be using a Timer

from contextlib import contextmanager
import threading
import _thread

class TimeoutException(Exception):
    def __init__(self, msg=''):
        self.msg = msg

@contextmanager
def time_limit(seconds, msg=''):
    timer = threading.Timer(seconds, lambda: _thread.interrupt_main())
    timer.start()
    try:
        yield
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        raise TimeoutException("Timed out for operation {}".format(msg))
    finally:
        # if the action ends in specified time, timer is canceled
        timer.cancel()

import time
# ends after 5 seconds
with time_limit(5, 'sleep'):
    for i in range(10):
        time.sleep(1)

# this will actually end after 10 seconds
with time_limit(5, 'sleep'):
    time.sleep(10)

The key technique here is the use of _thread.interrupt_main to interrupt the main thread from the timer thread. One caveat is that the main thread does not always respond to the KeyboardInterrupt raised by the Timer quickly. For example, time.sleep() calls a system function so a KeyboardInterrupt will be handled after the sleep call.

Answer 3

Here's a Linux/OSX way to limit a function's running time. This is in case you don't want to use threads, and want your program to wait until the function ends, or the time limit expires.

from multiprocessing import Process
from time import sleep

def f(time):
    sleep(time)


def run_with_limited_time(func, args, kwargs, time):
    """Runs a function with time limit

    :param func: The function to run
    :param args: The functions args, given as tuple
    :param kwargs: The functions keywords, given as dict
    :param time: The time limit in seconds
    :return: True if the function ended successfully. False if it was terminated.
    """
    p = Process(target=func, args=args, kwargs=kwargs)
    p.start()
    p.join(time)
    if p.is_alive():
        p.terminate()
        return False

    return True


if __name__ == '__main__':
    print run_with_limited_time(f, (1.5, ), {}, 2.5) # True
    print run_with_limited_time(f, (3.5, ), {}, 2.5) # False

Answer 4

I would usually prefer using a contextmanager as suggested by @josh-lee

But in case someone is interested in having this implemented as a decorator, here's an alternative.

Here's how it would look like:

import time
from timeout import timeout

class Test(object):
    @timeout(2)
    def test_a(self, foo, bar):
        print foo
        time.sleep(1)
        print bar
        return 'A Done'

    @timeout(2)
    def test_b(self, foo, bar):
        print foo
        time.sleep(3)
        print bar
        return 'B Done'

t = Test()
print t.test_a('python', 'rocks')
print t.test_b('timing', 'out')

And this is the timeout.py module:

import threading

class TimeoutError(Exception):
    pass

class InterruptableThread(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self, func, *args, **kwargs):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self._func = func
        self._args = args
        self._kwargs = kwargs
        self._result = None

    def run(self):
        self._result = self._func(*self._args, **self._kwargs)

    @property
    def result(self):
        return self._result


class timeout(object):
    def __init__(self, sec):
        self._sec = sec

    def __call__(self, f):
        def wrapped_f(*args, **kwargs):
            it = InterruptableThread(f, *args, **kwargs)
            it.start()
            it.join(self._sec)
            if not it.is_alive():
                return it.result
            raise TimeoutError('execution expired')
        return wrapped_f

The output:

python
rocks
A Done
timing
Traceback (most recent call last):
  ...
timeout.TimeoutError: execution expired
out

Notice that even if the TimeoutError is thrown, the decorated method will continue to run in a different thread. If you would also want this thread to be "stopped" see: Is there any way to kill a Thread in Python?

Answer 5

An improvement on @rik.the.vik's answer would be to use the with statement to give the timeout function some syntactic sugar:

import signal
from contextlib import contextmanager

class TimeoutException(Exception): pass

@contextmanager
def time_limit(seconds):
    def signal_handler(signum, frame):
        raise TimeoutException("Timed out!")
    signal.signal(signal.SIGALRM, signal_handler)
    signal.alarm(seconds)
    try:
        yield
    finally:
        signal.alarm(0)


try:
    with time_limit(10):
        long_function_call()
except TimeoutException as e:
    print("Timed out!")

Answer 6

Here's a timeout function I think I found via google and it works for me.

From: http://code.activestate.com/recipes/473878/

def timeout(func, args=(), kwargs={}, timeout_duration=1, default=None):
    '''This function will spwan a thread and run the given function using the args, kwargs and 
    return the given default value if the timeout_duration is exceeded 
    ''' 
    import threading
    class InterruptableThread(threading.Thread):
        def __init__(self):
            threading.Thread.__init__(self)
            self.result = default
        def run(self):
            try:
                self.result = func(*args, **kwargs)
            except:
                self.result = default
    it = InterruptableThread()
    it.start()
    it.join(timeout_duration)
    if it.isAlive():
        return it.result
    else:
        return it.result