Question

I was trying to download images with multi-thread, which has a limited max_count in python.

Each time a download_thread is started, I leave it alone and activate another one. I hope the download process could be ended in 5s, which means downloading is failed if opening the url costs more than 5s.

But how can I know it and stop the failed thread???

Answer 1

Can you tell which version of python you are using?
Maybe you could have posted a snippet too.
From Python 2.6, you have a timeout added in urllib2.urlopen.
Hope this will help you. It’s from the python docs.

urllib2.urlopen(url[, data][,
timeout]) Open the URL url, which can
be either a string or a Request
object.

Warning HTTPS requests do not do any
verification of the server’s
certificate. data may be a string
specifying additional data to send to
the server, or None if no such data is
needed. Currently HTTP requests are
the only ones that use data; the HTTP
request will be a POST instead of a
GET when the data parameter is
provided. data should be a buffer in
the standard
application/x-www-form-urlencoded
format. The urllib.urlencode()
function takes a mapping or sequence
of 2-tuples and returns a string in
this format. urllib2 module sends
HTTP/1.1 requests with
Connection:close header included.

The optional timeout parameter
specifies a timeout in seconds for
blocking operations like the
connection attempt (if not specified,
the global default timeout setting
will be used). This actually only
works for HTTP, HTTPS and FTP
connections.

This function returns a file-like
object with two additional methods:

geturl() — return the URL of the
resource retrieved, commonly used to
determine if a redirect was followed
info() — return the meta-information
of the page, such as headers, in the
form of an mimetools.Message instance
(see Quick Reference to HTTP Headers)
Raises URLError on errors.

Note that None may be returned if no
handler handles the request (though
the default installed global
OpenerDirector uses UnknownHandler to
ensure this never happens).

In addition, default installed
ProxyHandler makes sure the requests
are handled through the proxy when
they are set.

Changed in version 2.6: timeout was
added.