[coyotos-dev] Timeouts (was Sleep for interval)

[Sam Mason]

On Fri, Oct 05, 2007 at 09:29:20AM -0700, Charles Landau wrote:
> At 11:56 AM -0400 10/5/07, Christopher Nelson wrote:
> >there are places where it seems impossible to get away from 
> >timeouts.  As an example, trying to connect to an unresponsive host. 
> >You will never get a "fail" message.  At some point you have to stop 
> >trying.
> 
> At some point you have to stop trying, but that point need not be 
> defined by the passage of a pre-specified amount of time. Unless 
> there is a reason for a specific timeout (the disk seek example), you 
> should pass the responsibility to stop trying back up to your client, 
> who might have better knowledge.
> 
> For example: a user types a command to transfer a file from a host 
> that turns out to be unresponsive. The file transfer program has no 
> clue how long to wait, so it should not timeout. When the user gets 
> tired of waiting, he should be able to cancel the command. The user 
> might know that certain hosts are more responsive than others.

What about non-interactive, scheduled, jobs?  I'd quite like to be able
to say that if it takes longer than 10 seconds to initially connect to
a host then abort the whole task.  Additionally, I know that it takes
longer than 10 seconds for the whole job to complete so I can't set a
simple coarse maximum run-time for the whole thing.

Would I be best proxying the network access here?  Or are there better
ways of doing this?


  Sam