Bug #11592: need for an a SIGALRM based timeout mecanism

From: thomas.morin@webmotion.com Operating system: irrelevant PHP version: 4.0.5 PHP Bug Type: Feature/Change Request Bug description: need for an a SIGALRM based timeout mecanism As mentionned in #9676, in #8595 and in comments in the set_time_limit function online manual page, set_time_limit seems to be not suitable to solve some problems like : - fopen on a url for which the distant server is not responding - exec an external program which hangs - trying to resolve some DNS name - sleep() - etc. The "better" solution I've read was a suggestion to use SOAP or XML-RPC to wrap such requests... this would be like using a hammer to kill a fly... :) It would be _great_ to have a mecanism (based on an alarm signal or similar for instance) to be able to define a timeout on all low-level functions (or at least some of them like fopen, fsockopen, exec, gethostby...). Such a missing feature can be a show stopper one for people needing to retrieve data from an (unreliable?) external datafeed for instance. -- Edit Bug report at: http://bugs.php.net/?id=11592&edit=1