Does Google App Engine support Python's signal module? [duplicate]

Question

Since the signal module is not supported in the python version of Google App Engine, what is the simplest way to call a method and throw/catch an exception if the method does not return in less than 2 seconds?

Answer 1

If you are talking about RPC calls, such as the datastore, you can create an RPC with a deadline (see create_rpc), pass the RPC to your datastore function (db.get, db.put, etc...), then catch DeadlineExceededErrors.

# Set a five-second timeout
rpc = db.create_rpc(deadline=5)

# A query:
query = YourModel.all().fetch(100, rpc=rpc)

The URLFetch fetch function also takes a deadline parameter.

For your own code you could implement checking yourself, see the time module.