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

The method from @user2283347 is tested working, but we want to get rid of the traceback messages. Use pass trick from Remove traceback in Python on Ctrl-C, the modified code is:

from contextlib import contextmanager
import threading
import _thread

class TimeoutException(Exception): pass

@contextmanager
def time_limit(seconds):
    timer = threading.Timer(seconds, lambda: _thread.interrupt_main())
    timer.start()
    try:
        yield
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        pass     
    finally:
        # if the action ends in specified time, timer is canceled
        timer.cancel()

def timeout_svm_score(i):
     #from sklearn import svm
     #import numpy as np
     #from IPython.core.display import display
     #%store -r names X Y
     clf = svm.SVC(kernel='linear', C=1).fit(np.nan_to_num(X[[names[i]]]), Y)
     score = clf.score(np.nan_to_num(X[[names[i]]]),Y)
     #scoressvm.append((score, names[i]))
     display((score, names[i])) 
     
%%time
with time_limit(5):
    i=0
    timeout_svm_score(i)
#Wall time: 14.2 s

%%time
with time_limit(20):
    i=0
    timeout_svm_score(i)
#(0.04541284403669725, '计划飞行时间')
#Wall time: 16.1 s

%%time
with time_limit(5):
    i=14
    timeout_svm_score(i)
#Wall time: 5h 43min 41s

We can see that this method may need far long time to interrupt the calculation, we asked for 5 seconds, but it work out in 5 hours.