interruptingcow

interruptingcow is a generic Python utility that can relatively gracefully interrupt your code when it doesn't execute within a specific number of seconds:

from interruptingcow import timeout

try:
 with timeout(5):
 # perform a potentially very slow operation
 pass
except RuntimeError:
 print "didn't finish within 5 seconds"

Installation

 pip install interruptingcow

Caveats

Interruptingcow uses signal(SIGALRM) to let the operating system interrupt program execution. This has the following limitations:

1. Python signal handlers only apply to the main thread, so you cannot use this from other threads
2. You must not use this in a program that uses SIGALRM itself

Requirements:

• Python