Ruby Timeout::timeout doesn't fire Exception and doesn't return what documented

Question

I have this piece of code:

begin
  complete_results = Timeout.timeout(4) do      
    results = platform.search(artist, album_name)
  end
rescue Timeout::Error
  puts 'Print me something please'
end 

I then launch the method containing this code, and well, here is the beginning of a stack trace:

Exception message :  execution expired
Exception backtrace :  /***/****/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.8.7-p302/lib/ruby/1.8/timeout.rb:64:i

So I naively thinks that my call timed out, but 'Print me something please' is never printed and complete_results which is suppose to be the timeout status return value (either true or false, as mentioned in the documentation), is definitively not a boolean.

Am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

Your code is correct

require 'timeout'
begin
  complete_results = Timeout.timeout(1) do      
   sleep(2)
  end
rescue Timeout::Error
  puts 'Print me something please'
end

does print out "print me something please".

Try the basic code as above. If that works, you have an issue in platform.search.

Answer 2

The problem is that platform.search is catching the exception that Timeout#timeout throws.

You can get around this by wrapping your inner code in another thread -- YMMV.

begin
  complete_results = Timeout.timeout(4) do
    Thread.new{ results = platform.search(artist, album_name) }.value
  end
rescue Timeout::Error
  puts 'Print me something please'
end