Outside

Watches after your blocks of code and makes sure that they find their way back home.

Description

Currently wraps blocks of code (for example those handling outbound connections) into a timeout block. The idea is to add all of the generic things that should wrap connections and similar cases right here. Feel free to expand the gem.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'outside'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install outside

Usage

Outside.go(options) do
  # code
end

Default behavior is the following: if the block passed to the method does not finish executing in the given time (default is 5 seconds), it will be stopped and a Timeout::Error will be raised.

Possible options for changing the default behavior are:

• :iteration_limit - Timeout duration for one iteration. Default value is 5 seconds.
• :total_limit - Timeout duration for all of iterations (first one plus the retries). Default value is 3600 seconds (1 hour).
• :retry_count - Retry count. Default is 0.
• :interval_duration - Interval between retries. Default is 0.
• :interval_increment - Value by which the interval is incremented between retries. Default is 0.
• :interval_factor - Factor by which the interval is multiplied between retries. Default is 1.
• :interval_randomness - Range of randomness for the random factor (see interval calculation below). It is a number between 0 and 1. Random factor will be a number in the range of (1 - interval_randomness, 1 + interval_randomness). Default is 0, meaning that the random factor will be 1 and therefore the interval will remain unchanged.
• :interval_limit - Maximum interval value. Not set by default.
• :handle_timeout - Sets if Timeout::Error will be raised in case of a timeout. If it is false, it will not raise anything and it will return nil. Default value is true.

All temporal values are in seconds.

Interval calculation:

iteration_interval = random_factor * (interval_factor * previous_iteration_interval + interval_increment)

Example with options:

options = {
  :iteration_limit => 10,
  :retry_count => 3,
  :interval_duration => 5
}

Outside.go(options) do
  # code
end