Time out an R command via something like try()

Question

I\'m running a large number of iterations in parallel. Certain iterates take much (say 100x) longer than others. I want to time these out, but I\'d rather not have to dig in

Answer 1

See this thread: http://r.789695.n4.nabble.com/Time-out-for-a-R-Function-td3075686.html

and ?evalWithTimeout in the R.utils package.

Here's an example:

require(R.utils)

## function that can take a long time
fn1 <- function(x)
{
    for (i in 1:x^x)
    {
        rep(x, 1000)
    }
    return("finished")
}

## test timeout
evalWithTimeout(fn1(3), timeout = 1, onTimeout = "error") # should be fine
evalWithTimeout(fn1(8), timeout = 1, onTimeout = "error") # should timeout