[launchd-dev] Enforce a maximum time that a launchd process can live...

[Damien Sorresso]

On Jan 26, 2010, at 8:04 AM, Michael Ledford wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have a process I would like to used launchd to control. Its job is very simple; look for messages that are waiting in a SQLite database and send them synchronously with NSMutableURLRequest via HTTP. The problem I face is occasionally on production machines I have found that the networking request becomes stalled for some reason which causes the process to simply sit waiting.
> 
> I was hoping that launchd would be able to enforce a maximum time that a process can live using the ExitTimeout key.

In general, launchd doesn't automatically kill jobs except when a session is being torn down.

> The documentation isn't very clear to me on this point. At first I took it as this is the maximum length of time the process would live before launchd would send it a SIGKILL. However, it was pointed out to me by someone they believe it is the time between launchd sending a SIGTERM and SIGKILL. This would only occur if the launchd process was stopped or removed and doesn't exit within the specified ExitTimeout causing a SIGKILL to be sent.

Correct.

> In the ideal world people would say, "Your problem is a bug and it needs to be fixed." However, in the real world where frameworks are not under my control this isn't an option. In this case I want to work around the problem. I want to specify a maximum amount of time that a process can live and then have it terminated if it exceeds that time.

Is the NSMutableURLRequest encapsulated in some API that you're using which doesn't support a timeout interval? Because NSMutableURLRequest itself does.

If this is the case, you can spin the synchronous call out into its own thread/GCD queue and install a timer that exits after 20 seconds (or however long you'd like).

Alternatively, you could use the SCNetworkReachability APIs to get a callback when your destination is reachable and attempt the send then. You'd also have the aforementioned timer so that, if the host doesn't become reachable within a certain amount of time, you give up and exit.

> Can I accomplish a process living for a certain amount of time and then being asked to terminate via launchd? If not, what other options do I have?


See above.
-- 
Damien Sorresso
BSD Engineering
Apple Inc.