How can I kill a ruby thread after a certain amount of time?

Question

I want a thread that I create to die if it doesn't finish after a certain amount of time. Is there any elegant and/or idiomatic way to do this? Right now I am thinking to make a watcher thread:

def myfunc
  t = Thread.new{
    #do stuff
  }

  # watcher thread
  Thread.new{
    result = t.join(20) # join returns nil if it timed out
    t.kill if result.nil?
  }

  # continue on asynchronously from both threads
end

Answer 1

Maybe the Timeout class is what you need.

def myfunc
  Thread.new{
    Timeout::timeout(20) {
      #do stuff
    }
  }

  # continue on asynchronously
end

Answer 2

I believe in most situation, you should control the "life" of thread by the program logic in the thread.

Assume the thread is actually a infinite loop, instead of having a plain while(true), you may have an instance variable (e.g. is_running) and make the loop being something like while(is_running). If other thread wanna stop this thread, they can simply (directly or indirectly) make is_running false. The working thread then can finish off the last piece of work on hand and finish the loop.