python's threading has no "interrupt"?

[Jay O'Connor]

Peter Hansen wrote:

>Jay O'Connor wrote:
>  
>
>>....  When the background
>>process would wake up, since it was a higher priority, it would
>>immediately take control.  It's main job was to check the list of
>>handling processes for any that had been running too long (long running
>>processes in a web server meant that something had gone wrong) and
>>terminate them (freeing up the process and socket resources, etc..).
>>    
>>
>
>Can you describe the nature of the "something had gone wrongs" that
>you were trying to handle?  It's a very important point for a design
>like this.  Could these processes launch external programs which 
>might not exit in time?  Were they possibly buggy, encountering for
>example endless loops?  Were they dynamically loaded code written by
>others, which could mean malicious behaviour was possible?  Or something
>else?
>
>Depending on the answer, it will be either very easy to handle in Python,
>or very hard, or potentially impossible in a straightforward fashion.
>  
>

The problem is that we didn't know what it could be.  We had exception 
handlers at lower levels sufficient to handle coding bugs and file i/o 
issues.  What ususally killed us was  a network error that terminated 
the connection in mid transaction at some point  or even just the user 
hitting 'cancel' mid stream

FWIW - the 'cleanup' process running at higher priority also took care 
of some bookkeeping,  stats collecting, some memory management 
(releasing cached objects untouched for awhile so they could be GC), etc...