How to limit execution time of a function call?

I'm not sure how cross-platform this might be, but using signals and alarm might be a good way of looking at this. With a little work you could make this completely generic as well and usable in any situation.

http://docs.python.org/library/signal.html

So your code is going to look something like this.

import signal

def signal_handler(signum, frame):
    raise Exception("Timed out!")

signal.signal(signal.SIGALRM, signal_handler)
signal.alarm(10)   # Ten seconds
try:
    long_function_call()
except Exception, msg:
    print "Timed out!"

I prefer a context manager approach because it allows the execution of multiple python statements within a with time_limit statement. Because windows system does not have SIGALARM, a more portable and perhaps more straightforward method could be using a Timer

from contextlib import contextmanager
import threading
import _thread

class TimeoutException(Exception):
    def __init__(self, msg=''):
        self.msg = msg

@contextmanager
def time_limit(seconds, msg=''):
    timer = threading.Timer(seconds, lambda: _thread.interrupt_main())
    timer.start()
    try:
        yield
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        raise TimeoutException("Timed out for operation {}".format(msg))
    finally:
        # if the action ends in specified time, timer is canceled
        timer.cancel()

import time
# ends after 5 seconds
with time_limit(5, 'sleep'):
    for i in range(10):
        time.sleep(1)

# this will actually end after 10 seconds
with time_limit(5, 'sleep'):
    time.sleep(10)

The key technique here is the use of _thread.interrupt_main to interrupt the main thread from the timer thread. One caveat is that the main thread does not always respond to the KeyboardInterrupt raised by the Timer quickly. For example, time.sleep() calls a system function so a KeyboardInterrupt will be handled after the sleep call.

An improvement on @rik.the.vik's answer would be to use the with statement to give the timeout function some syntactic sugar:

import signal
from contextlib import contextmanager

class TimeoutException(Exception): pass

@contextmanager
def time_limit(seconds):
    def signal_handler(signum, frame):
        raise TimeoutException("Timed out!")
    signal.signal(signal.SIGALRM, signal_handler)
    signal.alarm(seconds)
    try:
        yield
    finally:
        signal.alarm(0)


try:
    with time_limit(10):
        long_function_call()
except TimeoutException as e:
    print("Timed out!")

Here's a Linux/OSX way to limit a function's running time. This is in case you don't want to use threads, and want your program to wait until the function ends, or the time limit expires.

from multiprocessing import Process
from time import sleep

def f(time):
    sleep(time)


def run_with_limited_time(func, args, kwargs, time):
    """Runs a function with time limit

    :param func: The function to run
    :param args: The functions args, given as tuple
    :param kwargs: The functions keywords, given as dict
    :param time: The time limit in seconds
    :return: True if the function ended successfully. False if it was terminated.
    """
    p = Process(target=func, args=args, kwargs=kwargs)
    p.start()
    p.join(time)
    if p.is_alive():
        p.terminate()
        return False

    return True


if __name__ == '__main__':
    print run_with_limited_time(f, (1.5, ), {}, 2.5) # True
    print run_with_limited_time(f, (3.5, ), {}, 2.5) # False