Timeout a function (windows)?

I think a good way to approach this is to create a decorator and use the Thread.join(timeout=seconds) method. Bear in mind that there’s no good way to kill the thread, so it will continue to run in the background, more or less, as long as your program is running.

First, create a decorator like this:

from threading import Thread
import functools

def timeout(timeout):
    def deco(func):
        @functools.wraps(func)
        def wrapper(*args, **kwargs):
            res = [Exception('function [%s] timeout [%s seconds] exceeded!' % (func.__name__, timeout))]
            def newFunc():
                try:
                    res[0] = func(*args, **kwargs)
                except Exception as e:
                    res[0] = e
            t = Thread(target=newFunc)
            t.daemon = True
            try:
                t.start()
                t.join(timeout)
            except Exception as je:
                print ('error starting thread')
                raise je
            ret = res[0]
            if isinstance(ret, BaseException):
                raise ret
            return ret
        return wrapper
    return deco

Then, do something like this:

func = timeout(timeout=16)(MyModule.MyFunc)
try:
    func()
except:
    pass #handle errors here

You can use this decorator anywhere you need with something like:

@timeout(60)
def f():
    ...