At tonight's Chicago Perl Mongers Office Hours, Ray came up with an interesting problem. While testing all of CPAN for CPAN Testers, how do you detect when a test is hanging and kill it before it takes down the entire machine? How do you simply kill a test that is taking too long? And how do you do it without having a wholly separate watchdog program?

Ray's using Parallel::ForkManager to execute testing jobs in parallel across multiple Perl installs. There are a few ways we could implement timeouts, including IPC::Run's timeout function, or the alarm Perl built-in, but these must all be implemented in the child process. It'd be nicer if we could use the parent process to watch its own children.

Continue reading Timeout for Parallel::ForkManager...