I was recently looking for a tool which would allow me to limit the total execution time of a process and its children. I haven’t found anything, so I decided to implement such a feature in Process Governor, my open-source process-monitoring application. You may download the v2.3 version from GitHub. In this post, I want to present you the new functionality and describe its implementation details.
When we know the PIDs of our running processes, we could use a simple command to wait for the processes to finish (the Wait-Process
cmdlet is an ideal example) and kill the remaining ones if they pass the limit. However, what if we only know the PID of the initial process? Tracking processes hierarchy in a script could become problematic. A simple and clear solution would be to assign a job object to the initial process, let it create new processes, wait the specified period and terminate the job if any of the processes is still running (terminating the job exits all the processes). There are, however, few questions we need to answer:
- How do we know all processes associated with the job finished their execution?
- What types of process execution time should we measure?