Re: [Tracker] Killing run-away child processes

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

Edward Duffy wrote:
> Text filtering, metadata extraction, and thumbnail generation are all
> handled out of process so they can't crash trackerd.  However these
> processes are called with g_spawn_sync and there's no gaurentee they
> will come back.
>
> Here's a patch that will set SIGALRM for these external processes, it
> uses the child_setup callback function, so there's no need for every
> possible child process to set its own alarm.
so we get back a SIGALRM signal which we dont currently handle after 30 
secs?
dont we need a way to kill these external processes if they timeout?

(kinda tricky without the pids although we could execute "killall -9 
tracker-extract" though that wont do for the other types and is a bit 
hacky!)
Another way to do this is within tracker-extract with the extraction 
performed in another thread with the main thread being a timer that 
kills itself if it timeouts. We could also have a tracker-filter program 
to do likewise with text filters ( and tracker-thumb too) - it would be 
cleaner but do you fancy doing the work?

--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://jamiemcc.livejournal.com/