Faraday: you may want to install system_timer for reliable timeouts

Question

I migrated an old script to a new CentOS box and got the following message when running the script:

Faraday: you may want to install system_timer for reliable timeouts

Is it a warning and what is system_timer? A gem?

Answer 1

It is a gem.

You should not need it any more, though, as it only supports Ruby 1.8 and older (and Ruby 1.8 is officially deprecated).

From http://ph7spot.com/musings/system-timer:

Update: system_timer is only relevant if you are running Ruby 1.8. You do not need it if you are running Ruby 1.9, JRuby, Rubinius or MacRuby. Actually using system_timer with one of these Ruby interpreters would not even make any sense since, as explained in this article, system_timer is designed to workaround a fundamental limitation of the threading implementation in Ruby M.R.I. 1.8 (green threads). All other Ruby interpreters use native threads and timeout.rb should work as expected as long as the global interpreter lock is released.