Question

How do I limit the maximum execution time when executing a java app from command line, like this:

java -Xmx10G -cp /weka/weka.jar weka.classifiers.trees.J48 -t
/test/test-vector.arff -d /test/test.model

Answer 1

I don’t believe there’s anything built into Java to do this for you. Options:

• Write a wrapper class which launches the original class but also creates a timer thread to kill the current process if it hasn’t finished in time.
• Use the operating system capabilities

As an example of the latter, in bash on Unix-like systems you could use ulimit -t [seconds] before starting the process.

EDIT: As noted in comments, it’s not clear how graceful such a shutdown with ulimit would be – whether the threads would be killed in a sufficiently polite way to allow finally blocks to execute etc. That’s probably something worth testing out.

EDIT: Again as per comments, ulimit limits the CPU time, not the overall wall time. This may or may not be what you’re after – it depends if your process is CPU-bound.