Safety timer for forced exit

[skreien]

Hey everyone,

I have a compiled script that calls an older UDF. It works 99.99% of the time, but every great once in a while it will get stuck. Not sure why or how, but when it does I just want it to exit. Is there a way to set a timer that forces a script to exit after say 2 minutes regardless of its status? Obviously there's many ways to do it external to the script; I'm wondering if there's a way to do it internally? Things are evaluated from the top down, and if the script is stuck on a call and can't proceed, how can I just force it to exit?

Thanks!

[JohnOne]

AdlibRegister() ?

[clicked]

I ended up writing a fairly simple "Watchdog" process. I needed this extra complexity because I have a bunch of communicating processes on a network. If something goes wrong, I want them all to shut down and also kill various other processes that have been started. The watchdogs start in either a "master" (for one) or "slave" (for the rest) mode, the slaves connect to the master and the master multicasts a message once a second. If things go silent for 20 seconds then the watchdogs kill everything.

[skreien]

AdlibRegister looks like it can do exactly what I want. If it's been running for over a minute I can exit the script from there. Looks like a good way to run repetitive checks. I've never seen that function before. Thanks!

[skreien]

I think I may have found the problem. I had a consolewrite in the app from previous efforts, even though it's not a dos application. It looks like whenever it hit the consolewrite it would just pause. not even the Adlib function could force it to exit. Anyone know if that's expected behavior, or a bug? I would suspect the latter.

[BrewManNH]

It's more than likely not a bug with consolewrite, and definitely not expected behavior, that it would pause a script, in fact I've never encountered this in the hundreds of scripts I use consolewrites in. I'd suspect something else in your script, or with the computer it's being used on.

[caleb41610]

Fixing the bug would be infinitely better than trying to detect and skip it. I probably can't give much help further than that though. :-|

[kylomas]

skreien,

Here's a thought, post the script!

kylomas

[skreien]

I took the consolewrite out of it to see if that's causing my problem. It only hits it every few days though, so it will probably be a few days before I know.

Kylomas: RIght now I'm not posting it because I'm trying to figure out if it's stopping in the call to the UDF, or if it's somewhere in what I've written. Until I know that I don't know what to ask for help with. I've added some code to write a log file as it executes so I can see the last step that executed before it locked up. That's what led me to the consolewrite. That was the very next instruction after the last logfile write.

[skreien]

Matter of fact, now that I look at it it HAS to be the consolewrite.

_WRITELOG("process array console write error")
If $aProcessArray[0][3]=-1 Then  ConsoleWrite("**CPU Usage** was not able to be obtained this go-around"&@CRLF)
_WRITELOG("changed processes")

The last thing written to the logfile was "process array console write error". Then it hung for 12 hours until I ended the task.

[kylomas]

skreien,

I understand that you want to solve this yourself, and, good for you!

However, can offer little help without seeing the script.

The last thing written to the logfile was "process array console write error". Then it hung for 12 hours until I ended the task.

This does NOT mean that this was the last thing that the script was doing, as I'm sure you realize.

kylomas

[JohnOne]

Opt("TrayIconDebug", 1)

[skreien]

Thanks JohnOne for the idea, but it's being called periodically by another service so I'm not sure I'll be able to see the icon. I've marked the service as interactive so I'll see if it shows up.

[skreien]

Just wanted to let you know that I traced the problem down to a call to a UDF. There is an updated version to fix other problems so I'm going to give that a shot.

[kylomas]

skreien,

Don't know much about networking but ran across this looking for something else. Since your problem seems to be that the script is "hanging" intermittently (which probably means that it is getting an unexpected return from something) this seemed pertinent.

IP Multicast

The list of receivers has to exist somewhere. If you use IP Multicast, then the list of receivers is maintained by your networking equipment, usually a router or layer-3 switch. Enable Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) in your router, and then the receivers can send IGMP join requests to the router to add themselves to a multicast group. A multicast group is defined as an IP endpoint -- an IP address and a port. In IPv4, addresses 224.0.0.0 through 239.255.255.255 are designated as multicast addresses. To send a datagram to all of the members of the multicast group, just send the datagram once by UDP Unicast to the multicast group endpoint. The router will then forward the datagram to all members of the group.

If the receivers are not on the same LAN as you, you probably won't be able to use IP Multicast. IP Multicast will only work if you can know in advance the network route for all receivers who may join your multicast group, and make sure that all the network equipment is configured properly.

You can't use IP Multicast over the internet.

You may want to re-visit everywhere that you expect a return value (or the absence of one).

Good Luck,

kylomas

Edit: misread previous post

Edited November 1, 2012 by kylomas