Comment 13 for bug 520715

So this isn't a Puppet bug at all.

It looks to be a bug in the Ruby Timeout module that seems to be triggered when most of your cores are busy.

I can reliably reproduce it by firing up openssl speed (n-1) times where n is the number of cores and then using the Timeout module.

#!/usr/bin/ruby1.8
#

%x{/usr/bin/touch /tmp/7777}
puts "executed without timeout ok"

puts "executing with timeout"

require 'timeout'

status = Timeout::timeout(5) {
       %x{/usr/bin/touch /tmp/7777}
}

puts "executed with timeout ok"

which will produce something like:

root@testhost:~# ps auxww|grep [o]penssl
root 22337 99.6 0.0 14616 2028 pts/6 R 15:04 2:52 openssl speed
root 22338 99.9 0.0 14616 2028 pts/6 R 15:04 2:49 openssl speed
root 22339 100 0.0 14616 2024 pts/6 R 15:04 2:49 openssl speed

root@testhost:~# ~/tickle_ruby.rb
executed without timeout ok
executing with timeout
/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/timeout.rb:60: execution expired (Timeout::Error)
 from /root/tickle_ruby.rb:11

root@testhost:~# killall openssl
[1] Terminated openssl speed &>/dev/null
[2]- Terminated openssl speed &>/dev/null
[3]+ Terminated openssl speed &>/dev/null

root@testhost:~# ~/tickle_ruby.rb
executed without timeout ok
executing with timeout
executed with timeout ok