killing thread after timeout

[Paul Rubin]

Bryan Olson <fakeaddress at nowhere.org> writes:
> First, a portable worker-process timeout: In the child process,
> create a worker daemon thread, and let the main thread wait
> until either the worker signals that it is done, or the timeout
> duration expires. As the Python Library Reference states in
> section 7.5.6:

Maybe the child process can just use sigalarm instead of a separate
thread, to implement the timeout.

> If Unix-only is acceptable, we can set up the accepting socket,
> and then fork(). The child processes can accept() incomming
> connections on its copy of the socket. Be aware that select() on
> the process-shared socket is tricky, in that that the socket can
> select as readable, but the accept() can block because some
> other processes took the connection.

To get even more OS-specific, AF_UNIX sockets (at least on Linux) have
a feature called ancillary messages that allow passing file
descriptors between processes.  It's currently not supported by the
Python socket lib, but one of these days... .  But I don't think
Windows has anything like it.  No idea about QNX.