I''ve got a problem with timing out a C RFC call.
Essentially, I''ve got code that initializes and executes an RFC to a
remote server that, depending on the server, could take a significant
amount of time to return a response.
To minimize end-user impact, I wrapped the call with a timeout of 20
seconds.
When I executed a test, it didn''t appear to do anything as the process
still took 120-130 seconds to complete.
After digging around a bit, I discovered this writeup about timeout and
system calls
(http://adamblog.heroku.com/past/2008/6/17/battling_wedged_mongrels_with_a/).
I immediately installed SystemTimer
(http://ph7spot.com/articles/system_timer) and tried again:
begin
require ''system_timer''
MyTimer = SystemTimer
rescue LoadError
require ''timeout''
MyTimer = Timeout
end
def invoke(rfc)
MyTimer.timeout_after(20.seconds) do
rfc.invoke
end
rescue Timeout::Error
raise Timeout::Error, "RFC Call timed out after 20 seconds"
end
This time, it executed and waited the full length of time (120-130
seconds). 20 seconds AFTER it completed, I then saw the "RFC Call timed
out after 20 seconds" error written to the logs.
After some more investigation, I read about Terminator and the use of
new threads to kill stuck/long-running threads.
I installed it and updated my above block of code to use the Terminator
syntax.
This time when I ran it, a view of the process list showed that the new
thread got created with a timer of 20 seconds. 20 seconds into
processing, the thread showed as <Defunct> and nothing happened to the
existing thread... that is until it completed. Once the process
finished running, the mongrel log shows that it was issued a restart
command and restarted.
What am I doing wrong? There must be a way to timeout a system level C
API/RFC call...
Running Ruby 1.8.6 p114 on CentOS 5.1 64-bit with mongrel 1.1.5
Thanks in advance for anyone who can help!
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