Timeouts

[sdvillal]

Some computations in HCTSA can become unexpectedly slow. We could add a timeout parameter to avoid these dragging down all the computation.

It seems to me that timeouts are not simple to handle in single-threaded matlab-land, if possible at all. We could go for python (signal or multiprocessing + kill matlab session). Some links from google:

• http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2011/08/22/how-not-to-set-a-timeout-on-a-computation-in-python
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2281850/timeout-function-if-it-takes-too-long-to-finish
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/492519/timeout-on-a-python-function-call

oct2py already provides a session-wide timeout

[benfulcher]

Not such a big deal in my experience, I've not noticed it happen in a problematic way -- some operations scale very badly with time-series length, but this is more about problem-checking the algorithms rather than enforcing a time-out I think?