Blog Post

by Tim Lucas

3.times do
  begin
    Timeout::timeout(5) do
      # Call your third party (for a example, a payment gateway)
    end
    @success = true
    break
  rescue Exception
    # Try again!
  end
end

if @success
  # Jump for joy!
end

This post has 3 responses so far

1. def with_timeout(attempts = 3, timeout = 5)
     attempts.times do
       begin
         Timeout::timeout(timeout) do
           yield
         end
         return true
       rescue Exception
       end
     end
   end

   =>

   with_timeout do
     # ...
   end

   Fenrir2
   August 24th, 2006 at 4:53 am

2. Fenrir2, instead of catching all the exceptions would you not be better just to catch the Timeout::Error exception?

   I mean, if the code in the yield really has a problem you want to know about it…

   myrdhrin
   August 24th, 2006 at 6:48 am

3. Fenrir2: nice abstraction of my code :)

   myrdhrin: In my case I didn’t care watch was being thrown, but might be handier would be if you could pass in a array of exceptions to ignore.

   retry_with_timeout(:ignoring => [Timeout::Error, SomeOtherError]) { ... }

   There must be a way to make it sexier, say:

   3.times { try_with_timeout(5.seconds, :ignoring => SomeOtherError) { ... } }

   (the internal timeout should specify and catch its own timeout exception as well as SomeOtherError)

   I’ll have a play this evening and see if I can whip that up.

   timlucas
   August 24th, 2006 at 10:42 am