Set running time limit on a method in java

As answered of @MarcoS

I found timeout is not raised if method is locking something and not release cpu time to Timer. Then Timer cannot start new thread. So I change a bit by start Thread immediately and sleep inside thread.

        InterruptTimerTaskAddDel interruptTimerTask = new InterruptTimerTaskAddDel(
                Thread.currentThread(),timeout_msec);

        timer.schedule(interruptTimerTask, 0);

        /*
 * A TimerTask that interrupts the specified thread when run.
 */
class InterruptTimerTaskAddDel extends TimerTask {

    private Thread theTread;
    private long timeout;

    public InterruptTimerTaskAddDel(Thread theTread,long i_timeout) {
        this.theTread = theTread;
        timeout=i_timeout;
    }

    @Override
    public void run() {
        try {
            Thread.currentThread().sleep(timeout);
        } catch (InterruptedException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace(System.err);
        }
        theTread.interrupt();
    }

}

I did something similar in the past when spawning an external process with Runtime.getRuntime().exec(command). I think you could do something like this within your method:

Timer timer = new Timer(true);
InterruptTimerTask interruptTimerTask = new InterruptTimerTask(Thread.currentThread());
timer.schedule(interruptTimerTask, waitTimeout);
try {
    // put here the portion of code that may take more than "waitTimeout"
}
catch (InterruptedException e) {
    log.error("timeout exeeded");
}
finally {
    timer.cancel();
}

and here is InterruptTimerTask

/*
 * A TimerTask that interrupts the specified thread when run.
 */
protected class InterruptTimerTask extends TimerTask {

    private Thread theTread;
    
    public InterruptTimerTask(Thread theTread) {
        this.theTread = theTread;
    }

    @Override
    public void run() {
        theTread.interrupt();
    }
}

The Guava library has a very nice TimeLimiter that lets you do this on any method that's defined by an interface. It can generate a proxy for your object that has a "built-in" timeout.