Scala Futures - built in timeout?

You only get timeout behavior when you use blocking to get the results of the Future. If you want to use the non-blocking callbacks onComplete, onSuccess or onFailure, then you would have to roll your own timeout handling. Akka has built in timeout handling for request/response (?) messaging between actors, but not sure if you want to start using Akka. FWIW, in Akka, for timeout handling, they compose two Futures together via Future.firstCompletedOf, one which represents the actual async task and one that represents the timeout. If the timeout timer (via a HashedWheelTimer) pops first, you get a failure on the async callback.

A very simplified example of rolling your own might go something like this. First, an object for scheduling timeouts:

import org.jboss.netty.util.{HashedWheelTimer, TimerTask, Timeout}
import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit
import scala.concurrent.duration.Duration
import scala.concurrent.Promise
import java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException

object TimeoutScheduler{
  val timer = new HashedWheelTimer(10, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS)
  def scheduleTimeout(promise:Promise[_], after:Duration) = {
    timer.newTimeout(new TimerTask{
      def run(timeout:Timeout){              
        promise.failure(new TimeoutException("Operation timed out after " + after.toMillis + " millis"))        
      }
    }, after.toNanos, TimeUnit.NANOSECONDS)
  }
}

Then a function to take a Future and add timeout behavior to it:

import scala.concurrent.{Future, ExecutionContext, Promise}
import scala.concurrent.duration.Duration

def withTimeout[T](fut:Future[T])(implicit ec:ExecutionContext, after:Duration) = {
  val prom = Promise[T]()
  val timeout = TimeoutScheduler.scheduleTimeout(prom, after)
  val combinedFut = Future.firstCompletedOf(List(fut, prom.future))
  fut onComplete{case result => timeout.cancel()}
  combinedFut
}

Note that the HashedWheelTimer I am using here is from Netty.


All of these answers require additional dependencies. I decided to write a version using java.util.Timer which is an efficient way to run a function in the future, in this case to trigger a timeout.

Blog post with more details here

Using this with Scala's Promise, we can make a Future with timeout as follows: 

package justinhj.concurrency

import java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException
import java.util.{Timer, TimerTask}

import scala.concurrent.duration.FiniteDuration
import scala.concurrent.{ExecutionContext, Future, Promise}
import scala.language.postfixOps

object FutureUtil {

  // All Future's that use futureWithTimeout will use the same Timer object
  // it is thread safe and scales to thousands of active timers
  // The true parameter ensures that timeout timers are daemon threads and do not stop
  // the program from shutting down

  val timer: Timer = new Timer(true)

  /**
    * Returns the result of the provided future within the given time or a timeout exception, whichever is first
    * This uses Java Timer which runs a single thread to handle all futureWithTimeouts and does not block like a
    * Thread.sleep would
    * @param future Caller passes a future to execute
    * @param timeout Time before we return a Timeout exception instead of future's outcome
    * @return Future[T]
    */
  def futureWithTimeout[T](future : Future[T], timeout : FiniteDuration)(implicit ec: ExecutionContext): Future[T] = {

    // Promise will be fulfilled with either the callers Future or the timer task if it times out
    val p = Promise[T]

    // and a Timer task to handle timing out

    val timerTask = new TimerTask() {
      def run() : Unit = {
            p.tryFailure(new TimeoutException())
        }
      }

    // Set the timeout to check in the future
    timer.schedule(timerTask, timeout.toMillis)

    future.map {
      a =>
        if(p.trySuccess(a)) {
          timerTask.cancel()
        }
    }
    .recover {
      case e: Exception =>
        if(p.tryFailure(e)) {
          timerTask.cancel()
        }
    }

    p.future
  }

}

Play framework contains Promise.timeout so you can write code like following

private def get(): Future[Option[Boolean]] = {
  val timeoutFuture = Promise.timeout(None, Duration("1s"))
  val mayBeHaveData = Future{
    // do something
    Some(true)
  }

  // if timeout occurred then None will be result of method
  Future.firstCompletedOf(List(mayBeHaveData, timeoutFuture))
}

I've just created a TimeoutFuture class for a coworker:

TimeoutFuture

package model

import scala.concurrent._
import scala.concurrent.duration._
import play.libs.Akka
import play.api.libs.concurrent.Execution.Implicits._

object TimeoutFuture {
  def apply[A](timeout: FiniteDuration)(block: => A): Future[A] = {

    val prom = promise[A]

    // timeout logic
    Akka.system.scheduler.scheduleOnce(timeout) {
      prom tryFailure new java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException
    }

    // business logic
    Future { 
      prom success block
    }

    prom.future
  } 
}

Usage

val future = TimeoutFuture(10 seconds) { 
  // do stuff here
}

future onComplete {
  case Success(stuff) => // use "stuff"
  case Failure(exception) => // catch exception (either TimeoutException or an exception inside the given block)
}

Notes:

  • Assumes Play! framework (but it's easy enough to adapt)
  • Every piece of code runs in the same ExecutionContext which may not be ideal.

Tags:

Concurrency

Scala

Recent Posts