Timeout decorator

Installation

From source code:

python setup.py install

From pypi:

pip install timeout-decorator

Usage

import time
import timeout_decorator

@timeout_decorator.timeout(5)
def mytest():
    print("Start")
    for i in range(1,10):
        time.sleep(1)
        print("{} seconds have passed".format(i))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    mytest()

Specify an alternate exception to raise on timeout:

import time
import timeout_decorator

@timeout_decorator.timeout(5, timeout_exception=StopIteration)
def mytest():
    print("Start")
    for i in range(1,10):
        time.sleep(1)
        print("{} seconds have passed".format(i))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    mytest()

Multithreading

By default, timeout-decorator uses signals to limit the execution time of the given function. This appoach does not work if your function is executed not in a main thread (for example if it's a worker thread of the web application). There is alternative timeout strategy for this case - by using multiprocessing. To use it, just pass use_signals=False to the timeout decorator function:

import time
import timeout_decorator

@timeout_decorator.timeout(5, use_signals=False)
def mytest():
    print "Start"
    for i in range(1,10):
        time.sleep(1)
        print("{} seconds have passed".format(i))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    mytest()

Warning

Make sure that in case of multiprocessing strategy for timeout, your function does not return objects which cannot be pickled, otherwise it will fail at marshalling it between master and child processes.