right way to run some code with timeout in Python

Question

I looked online and found some SO discussing and ActiveState recipes for running some code with a timeout. It looks there are some common approaches:

• Use threa

Answer 1

What you might be looking for is the multiprocessing module. If subprocess is too heavy, then this may not suit your needs either.

import time
import multiprocessing

def do_this_other_thing_that_may_take_too_long(duration):
    time.sleep(duration)
    return 'done after sleeping {0} seconds.'.format(duration)

pool = multiprocessing.Pool(1)
print 'starting....'
res = pool.apply_async(do_this_other_thing_that_may_take_too_long, [8])
for timeout in range(1, 10):
    try:
        print '{0}: {1}'.format(duration, res.get(timeout))
    except multiprocessing.TimeoutError:
        print '{0}: timed out'.format(duration) 

print 'end'