Cancel threads after timeout

[Jason Friedman]

> On 26Jan2013 09:48, Matt Jones <matt.walker.jones at gmail.com> wrote:
> | It sounds like your real problem is with your SQL query...  Is that part of
> | this problem under your control?  Can you break the query into smaller,
> | quicker, pieces that you can run in a reasonable amount of time?
>
> Another option to investigate is whether you can ask the database itself
> to limit the run time of a query. Of course, that will abort the query
> but so does your proposed solution.
>
> Another approach might be to simply run each query regularly (with a
> pause between so the database is not spending its whole life running
> your query). Snapshot each latest result. Compute your report from the
> latest pair of snapshots at any given time on an independent schedule.
> It may not be valid for what you need, but if it is then this decouples
> you from the query time completely.

Along these lines, if you are running on Linux then the bash shell
comes with a "timeout" command, which you can prepend to snapshot
requests.