Need a good method for thread monitoring

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:05:10 -0700

A fairly large RTOS application I'm working on uses a command pattern for communications between processes. That is, if process A needs to invoke a function in process B, then A creates a command and puts that into a queue. Then a separate command thread in process A executes that command which involves making a CORBA call to invoke the function in process B.

During debugging it has been observed that sometimes these command threads become deadlocked awaiting on the distant process to finish. I am looking for a good method of monitoring these command threads and at a minimum logging when they deadlock and perhaps even recovering from such a situation.

Currently, I have implemented a method where another monitor thread for process A is created and the two threads interact as such (pseudocode):

commandThreadFunction()
   while (true)
      command_queue.pop(command)
      command_name = command.getName()
      command_timeout = command.getTimeout()
      monitor_thread_start.signal()
      command.execute()
      monitor_thread_done.signal()

monitorThreadFunction()
   while (true)
      monitor_thread_start.wait()
      monitor_thread_done.wait(command_timeout)
      if (timedout)
         print "Error: " + command_name + " timed out executing."

Is there a better way to implement thread monitoring?

-Nick

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Need a good method for thread monitoring