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How does rospy.Timer behave if it triggers while the previous callback is still busy?

asked 2016-12-26 11:14:16 -0500

spmaniato

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I'm using a rospy.Timer (periodic, not one-shot) to handle a long-running process in a non-blocking way. I only want one instance of the process to be running at any one time. Therefore, I thought I would have to implement some sort of lock in order to prevent subsequent Timer callbacks from triggering new instances of the process.

However, it seems like I didn't have to! Subsequent callbacks are not called if the previous one is still working. Or are they added to a queue like subscriber callbacks? Either is a good thing in my use case, but where can I find out more about it? It's not mentioned in http://wiki.ros.org/rospy/Overview/Ti... from what I can tell.

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answered 2016-12-26 12:30:10 -0500

NEngelhard
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You could have a look at the code: timer.py

The callback is directly executed (no thread) so if your function takes longer than your rate, it will be called as fast as possible (independent of your specified rate).

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Thanks for the link! According to the source code, it looks like the callback should be getting called regardless of whether the previous one has returned. That's not what I observed though. Hmm. I'll take another look.