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just like the title says is it possible to time a function's duration and stop it if it reaches a certain duration in python 3.7, sorry if this question is stupid im new and have tried looking for how in google and other stackoverflow questions but i haven't found anything that answers my question

Crisóstomo Musa
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  • Does this answer your question? [How to limit execution time of a function call?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/366682/how-to-limit-execution-time-of-a-function-call) – homer Nov 13 '21 at 09:01

1 Answers1

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I took the fibonacci sequence as the example function. This will solve your problem:

#fibonacci sequence
def fibonacci(n):
    a, b = 0, 1
    for i in range(n):
        a, b = b, a + b
    return a


#stop the function if it takes longer than 20 seconds
def fib_timeout(n):
    import signal
    import time
    def handler(signum, frame):
        raise Exception('Timeout')
    signal.signal(signal.SIGALRM, handler)
    signal.alarm(20)
    try:
        return fib(n)
    except:
        return 'Timeout'
    finally:
        signal.alarm(0)


fib_timeout(100000000000000)

(After 20 seconds) --> 'Timeout'


Maximilian Freitag
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  • your answers seems to be the correct one for my question but i am getting AttributeError: module 'signal' has no attribute 'SIGALRM' for some reason – Crisóstomo Musa Nov 13 '21 at 09:53
  • @CrisóstomoMusa Here is the google colab file --> https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1LgorMKkQ-zgDFs_eI1aIOLmTcNj9mKCm?usp=sharing ... so we have a common ground. Run both cells and wait 20 seconds. It would be great if you could mark it as correct. – Maximilian Freitag Nov 13 '21 at 10:24