python's threading has no "interrupt"?

[Peter Hansen]

Jay O'Connor wrote:
> 
> ....  When the background
> process would wake up, since it was a higher priority, it would
> immediately take control.  It's main job was to check the list of
> handling processes for any that had been running too long (long running
> processes in a web server meant that something had gone wrong) and
> terminate them (freeing up the process and socket resources, etc..).

Can you describe the nature of the "something had gone wrongs" that
you were trying to handle?  It's a very important point for a design
like this.  Could these processes launch external programs which 
might not exit in time?  Were they possibly buggy, encountering for
example endless loops?  Were they dynamically loaded code written by
others, which could mean malicious behaviour was possible?  Or something
else?

Depending on the answer, it will be either very easy to handle in Python,
or very hard, or potentially impossible in a straightforward fashion.

-Peter