Question

I am doing a project where I am loading several assemblies during runtime, for each of those assemblies I use reflection to find some specific classes, instantiate them and calling their methods. All this is working fine, but for some of the calls the process encounters a stack overflow which terminates my entire program. I don’t have any control over the source code of the assemblies I am loading so I cant change the code I’m executing.

What I have tried to solve the problem:

1. I assign a thread to do the invocation of the methods and tried to
   abort the thread after a timeintervall(I know that this is bad
   practice but I cant change the code to terminate friendly). This
   however doesn’t work, I think the thread is to busy “stackoverflowing”
   to handle the Abort-call.

2. Ive tried reducing the actual memory the thread has access to, this is not even a solution because you cant catch the stackoverflow-exception so my program terminates anyway (just quicker)

Questions:

1. Can a thread be to busy to be aborted? Is there some way to abort a thread that is having this behaviour?
2. How can we call code (that we don’t have any control over) in a good way?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The recommended procedure in case of “opaque code” is to actually fork a new process and start it. That way you gain two benefits:

1. If it fails by itself, it’s isolated and won’t take your main application down as well.
2. You can safely kill it and it won’t cause as much trouble as an aborted thread.