Program must know automatically if a loop takes too much time.

Question

5.00/5 (1 vote)

See more:

Say i have a for loop. I want the program to automatically 'continue' the for loop if the time spent inside one loop of the for loop is more than say 10 minutes. I want to run some additional commands to clean up the code too. Any Ideas how I can implement this ?

I can manage even if the loop breaks.

FYI,
My problem is that my service picks up a row from an SQL server and runs some logics on it but the logics sometimes goes into an infinite loop. Due to this I need to manually remove the row from the SQL server and restart the service.

Sorry for Bad English

Posted 30-Oct-13 21:46pm

rohith naik

Updated 30-Oct-13 21:47pm

v2

Add a Solution

2 solutions

Solution 1

Try this:

C#

using System.Diagnostics; // add this line to the top of your code file

C#

Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch();
sw.Start();
for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i++)
{
    if (sw.Elapsed.TotalMinutes >= 10)
    {
        // some actions before breaking out the loop
        sw.Stop();
        break;
    }
    // other actions here
}
if (sw.IsRunning)
{
    sw.Stop();
}

Hope this helps.

Posted 30-Oct-13 21:54pm

Thomas Daniels

Comments

rohith naik 31-Oct-13 3:58am

This not what i want. I want the program to 'automatically detect' if a particular iteration is taking more than 10 minutes. For example ,
Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch();
sw.Start();
for (int i = 0; i < 10000; i++)
{
if (sw.Elapsed.TotalMinutes >= 10)
{
// some actions before breaking out the loop
sw.Stop();
break;
}
MyFunction.Run(i);
}
if (sw.IsRunning)
{
sw.Stop();
}
If a loop in MyFunction.Run(i) takes more than 10 minutes this will not break/continue my loop. What I want to say is that the program must not wait for the loop to end but must take affirmative action as soon as 10 minutes is up. your code waits for it to end the current iteration and then checks for the condition in the next iteration. I think we need to use threads but i'm noob in that.

Thanks for the reply though.

Thomas Daniels 31-Oct-13 4:09am

OK, thanks for the explanation. I'll try to find a way to do that.

Thomas Daniels 31-Oct-13 4:19am

Then you should use my code in your MyFunction.Run method.

rohith naik 31-Oct-13 5:01am

Here was is a solution i thought of but I am having difficulty implementing it. I start 2 threads from my main loop. I make one thread sleep for 10 minutes and the other thread actually run my function. If the function returns a value before my sleeping thread then it is fine else abort the thread. But implementing it seems very hard.

Thomas Daniels 31-Oct-13 5:04am

The problem is that it is not really possible to abort a thread: you can use the Thread.Abort function, but you can't be 100% sure that this really aborts the thread. So, in your second thread, you must check whether the first thread said that the second thread should stop. The only way to abort a thread is to look at the value of a specific bool, and if the value of that bool is true, break out the loop.

Add a Solution

Add your solution here

Treat my content as plain text, not as HTML

Preview 0

…

Existing Members

Sign in to your account

...or Join us

Download, Vote, Comment, Publish.

Your Email
Password
Forgot your password?

Your Email
This email is in use. Do you need your password?
Optional Password

I have read and agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Please subscribe me to the CodeProject newsletters

When answering a question please:

Read the question carefully.
Understand that English isn't everyone's first language so be lenient of bad spelling and grammar.
If a question is poorly phrased then either ask for clarification, ignore it, or edit the question and fix the problem. Insults are not welcome.
Don't tell someone to read the manual. Chances are they have and don't get it. Provide an answer or move on to the next question.

Let's work to help developers, not make them feel stupid.

This content, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)

**Zoltán Zörgő** · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-31T02:48:00

A) You could try this approach:

C#

using System;
using System.Threading;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using System.Diagnostics;

class Program
{
    static long counter = 0;

    static void DoLongRunningTask(CancellationToken token)
    {
        token.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();

        Stopwatch stopwatch = new Stopwatch();
        stopwatch.Start();

        while (true)
        {
            Console.Write("{0}\r",counter++);
            if (token.IsCancellationRequested)
            {
                stopwatch.Stop();
                Console.WriteLine("\nCanceled. Cleaning up. Time elapsed: {0}", stopwatch.Elapsed);
                token.ThrowIfCancellationRequested();
            }
        }
    }

    static void Main()
    {
        var tokenSource = new CancellationTokenSource();
        var token = tokenSource.Token;
        var task = new Task(() => DoLongRunningTask(token), token);

        Console.Write("Task ");
        task.Start();
        tokenSource.CancelAfter(10000);
        Console.Write("started and should run 10 seconds\n");

        try  { task.Wait(); }
        catch { }

        Console.WriteLine("Status:      {0}", task.Status);
        Console.WriteLine("IsCanceled:  {0}", task.IsCanceled);
        Console.WriteLine("IsCompleted: {0}", task.IsCompleted);

        task.Dispose();

        Console.WriteLine("Finished. Press any key.");
        Console.ReadKey();
    }
}

Please note, that this is no brute-force cancellation. It won't "kill" the task, it requires neat finishing. So if you are blocked inside one operation - let's call it atomic in this sense -, this won't help you. (Source: http://www.blackwasp.co.uk/TaskCancellation_2.aspx[^])

You can however not wait in this manner for the task to complete, you could do anything else in your service in the meantime.

An interesting article, but I couldn't get it working in a few minutes: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pfxteam/archive/2011/11/10/10235834.aspx[^]

B)
Using workers: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7a2f3ay4(v=vs.90).aspx[^]

C)
For threading, you could use this approach: http://dotnet-snippets.com/snippet/end-thread-after-timeout/656[^], however you have top be careful with aborting treads. (see also: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5b50fdsz.aspx[^])

Anyway, you should be very careful with cleaning your resources when you stop such an execution.