I am using threading python module. I want to execute a function which runs an expression entered by a user. I want to wait for it to finish execution or until a timeout period is reached. The following code should timeout after 5 second, but it never times out.
def longFunc(): # this expression could be entered by the user return 45 ** 10 ** 1000 thread = threading.Thread(target=longFunc, args=(), daemon=True) thread.start() thread.join(5.0) print("end") # never reaches this point :(
Why is this and how can I fix this behaviour? Should I try to use multiprocessing instead?
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Answer
I suspect in this case you’re hitting an issue where the join
can’t execute while the global interpreter lock is held by the very long-running calculation, which I believe would happen as a single atomic operation. If you change longFunc
to something that happens over multiple instructions, such as a busy loop, e.g.
def longFunc(): while True: pass
then it works as expected. Is the single expensive calculation realistic for your situation or did the example just happen to hit a very bad case?
Using the multiprocessing
module does appear to resolve this issue:
from multiprocessing import Process def longFunc(): # this expression could be entered by the user return 45 ** 10 ** 1000 if __name__ == "__main__": thread = Process(target=longFunc, args=(), daemon=True) thread.start() thread.join(5.0) print("end")
This prints "end"
as expected.