Can I accidentally kill processes from another build?

[Victor_Rulev]

I'm running unit tests after the application is built. They can hang up, so I need to kill the process and fail the build after certain timeout.

I've written a batch file that handles it by using Windows "timeout", "tasklist" and "taskkill" commands. The question is, if two builds are launched simultaneously, is there a chance that one of them would kill the process from another build? And how about "tasklist" command, do separate builds have separate task lists?

[Jimmy Seddon · Accepted solution]

Hi @Victor_Rulev,

Welcome to the Community!

To answer your question directly, yes you can accidentally kill processes of another build if you aren't careful.

I haven't done what you are doing in a batch file, but we spawn a number of background jobs using Powershell for our builds and we are careful to give them specific naming conventions so that if we kill a job do to a timeout threshold being passed, we know that the job being terminated belongs to the build that spawned it.

I hope that help!

-Jimmy

[Jeyanthan I]

Hey @Victor_Rulev ,

If your intention is to identify and kill a hung build, how about configuring build monitoring that kills hung builds running in your remote agent?

Cheers, Jey

[Victor_Rulev]

I don't have access to that and I need a more "localized" solution. Besides, hung tests could be detected within 10 minutes, while timeout for a hung build could be a few hours.