Making a timebomb

[Peter Hansen]

Cantankerous Old Git wrote:
> callmebill at gmail.com wrote:
> 
>> I have a server that right now runs infinitely.  I'd like to make it
>> die after some amount of time.  
>
> The proper way to do it is to have the timer set a flag that the other 
> threads check regularly. The threads can then clean up and exit asap.
> 
> The dirty way, which can leave corrupt half-written files and other 
> nasties, is something like sys.exit().

sys.exit() won't help you if your server is running in the main thread, 
nor if your server thread is not marked as a daemon, but that does raise 
another possibility.  Instead of doing serve() in the main thread, spawn 
off a child thread to do the serving, and call setDaemon(True) on it. 
Then the _main_ thread can do sys.exit() and the server thread will be 
terminated (somewhat messily perhaps) -- even if it is blocked in an 
accept() call or some other external blocking call.

-Peter