How to limit execution time of a function call in Python

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

Answer 1

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?