canary

Native watchdog to monitor event loop deadlocks and terminate execution.

Usage

const watchdog = require('@microcode/canary');

watchdog.start();
while (condition) {
    await doThing();
}
watchdog.stop();

How does it work

This module launches a native thread that expects the JavaScript event loop to send a ping at regular intervals. If the event loop gets too busy to do this for a substantial period of time, the watchdog will consider the application deadlocked.

Currently the watchdog can then kill the application, or just store that a deadlock occured and return this when stopping the watchdog.

API

start(options)

Starts the watchdog.

• timeout - Timeout threshold for the watchdog in milliseconds (default: 10000)
• ping - Event loop ping interval in milliseconds (default: 1000)
• terminate - If set to true, the application will exit when triggered (default: true)
• print - If set to true, the application will print a message when triggered (default: true)

Throws an exception if the watchdog fails to start.

stop()

Stops the watchdog.

Returns a boolean indicating if the watchdog was triggered or not.