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Synopsis

System Timer, a timer based on underlying SIGALRM system timers, is a solution to Ruby processes which hang beyond the time limit when accessing external resources. This is useful when timeout.rb, which, on M.R.I 1.8, relies on green threads, does not work consistently.

More background on:

Usage

require 'system_timer'

SystemTimer.timeout_after(5) do

  # Something that should be interrupted if it takes too much time...
  # ... even if blocked on a system call!

end

Timeouts as Floats

You can use a floating point number when specifying the timeout in seconds but SystemTimer will not allow you to go below 200ms, e.g.

SystemTimer.timeout_after(0.5) do
  # timeout after 500ms
end

SystemTimer.timeout_after(0.01) do
  # timeout after (uncompressable) 200ms even if 10ms is requested
end

Note that SystemTimer is going through too many layers to be able to reliably guarantee a sub-second timeout on all platforms, so your mileage may vary when specifying timeouts under one second.

Custom Timeout Exceptions

You can also use a custom timeout exception to be raised on timeouts (to avoid interference with other libraries using Timeout::Error -- e.g. Net::HTTP)

require 'system_timer'

begin

  SystemTimer.timeout_after(5, MyCustomTimeoutException) do

    # Something that should be interrupted if it takes too much time...
    # ... even if blocked on a system call!

  end

rescue MyCustomTimeoutException => e
  # Recovering strategy
end

Requirements

SystemTimer only works on UNIX platforms (Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris, BSD, ...). You can install the gem on Microsoft Windows, but you will only get a convenience shell wrapping a simple call to timeout.rb under the cover.

Install

sudo gem install SystemTimer

Authors

Contributors

Copyright

Copyright:: (C) 2008-2010 David Vollbracht & Philippe Hanrigou

Description

While deploying Rails application in production our team discovered that some web service call would not timeout way beyond their defined limit, progressively freezing our Mongrel cluster until we restarted the servers. A closer analysis revealed that the native thread in charge of of the web service call was never scheduled, "stucked" on the service call. As it turn out the timeout library bundled with Ruby 1.8 (MRI) relies on green-threads to perform its magic... so the magic had no chance to happen in this scenario.

Based on an original idea by Kurtis Seebaldt http://kseebaldt.blogspot.com, David Vollbracht and Philippe Hanrigou pair programmed an alternative implementation based on system timers (the +SIGALRM+ POSIX signal): This design guarantees proper timeout behavior even when crossing-boundaries and accessing system/external resources. Special care has been taken to interfere as little as possible with other processes that might also rely on +SIGALRM+, in particular MySQL.

This implementation is not intended to be drop-in replacement to timeout.rb, just a way to wrap sensitive call to system resources.

You can find more details on SystemTimer and how to use it at http://ph7spot.com/articles/system_timer

License

(The Ruby License)

Copyright:: (C) 2008-2010 David Vollbracht & Philippe Hanrigou

SystemTimer is copyrighted free software by David Vollbracht and Philippe Hanrigou. You can redistribute it and/or modify it under either the terms of the GPL (see COPYING file), or the conditions below:

  1. You may make and give away verbatim copies of the source form of the software without restriction, provided that you duplicate all of the original copyright notices and associated disclaimers.

  2. You may modify your copy of the software in any way, provided that you do at least ONE of the following:

a) place your modifications in the Public Domain or otherwise
   make them Freely Available, such as by posting said
   modifications to Usenet or an equivalent medium, or by allowing
   the author to include your modifications in the software.

b) use the modified software only within your corporation or
   organization.

c) rename any non-standard executables so the names do not conflict
   with standard executables, which must also be provided.

d) make other distribution arrangements with the author.
  1. You may distribute the software in object code or executable form, provided that you do at least ONE of the following:
a) distribute the executables and library files of the software,
   together with instructions (in the manual page or equivalent)
   on where to get the original distribution.

b) accompany the distribution with the machine-readable source of
   the software.

c) give non-standard executables non-standard names, with
   instructions on where to get the original software distribution.

d) make other distribution arrangements with the author.

  1. You may modify and include the part of the software into any other software (possibly commercial). But some files in the distribution are not written by the author, so that they are not under this terms.

    They are gc.c(partly), utils.c(partly), regex.[ch], st.[ch] and some files under the ./missing directory. See each file for the copying condition.

  2. The scripts and library files supplied as input to or produced as output from the software do not automatically fall under the copyright of the software, but belong to whomever generated them, and may be sold commercially, and may be aggregated with this software.

  3. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.