[Zope-dev] Untrusted developers

[Brian Brinegar]

Howdy,

I work with a Zope deployment at a University. Each school has a folder 
within the Zope deploy where they have complete control. We allow each 
student, staff, and faculty member to have their own personal folder.

One of the problems with this is that users can write a script which 
loops indefinitely. When a script gets stuck in a loop it bogs down the 
ZEO client running it until the system kills that python process. 
Usually this is because someone is developing something new, when it 
doesn't work they make a change and try it again. Eventually all of the 
ZEO Clients are hung and everything is slow (and Zope looks bad to the 
bosses because this didn't happen with apache.)

What I would like to see is a timeout associated with code objects 
(Python Scripts, Page Templates) that is set to some small value like 10 
seconds by default. If the script does not complete within the timeout 
Zope would raise an exception. The user could bump up the timeout if 
they are writing something time intensive on purpose, but they wouldn't 
kill the whole web server (and important web pages) during development.

Has anything like this been considered previously? Is it something that 
would ever make it into a zope release if I was to work on a patch?

Thank you,
Brian Brinegar
Engineering Computer Network
Purdue University