libuv worker threads or work queue health check?

Question

In libuv, you can end up tying up the worker threads with too much work or buggy code. Is there a simple function that can check the health of the worker threads or thread queue? It doesn't have to be 100% deterministic, after all it would be impossible to determine whether the worker thread is hanging on slow code or an infinite loop.

So any of the following heuristics would be good:

• Number of queued items not yet worked on. If this is too large, it could mean the worker threads are busy or hung.

• Does libuv have any thread killing mechanism where if the worker thread doesn't check back in n seconds, it gets terminated?

Answer 1

That function does not exist in libuv itself, and I am not aware of any OSS that provides something like that.

In terms of a killing mechanism, there is none baked into libuv, but http://nikhilm.github.io/uvbook/threads.html#core-thread-operations suggests:

A well designed program would have a way to terminate long running workers that have already started executing. Such a worker could periodically check for a variable that only the main process sets to signal termination.