It's a little bit more complicated than that:- signals and threads don't mix well together- this will make syscalls fail with EINTR- the old SIGALRM handler is lost- etcIn short, don't use signals.I'm not sure there's a reliable way to write such a general-purpose wrapper (usually one can use select() with a timeout or spawn a subprocess and use communicate's timeout to achieve this kind of things).In your use case (issue#12157), I think that letting the test block is fine, since:- there's no easy way to add a timeout (but you could spawn a new interpreter and use communicate with a timeout if you really wanted to)- it will be caught by the faulthandler module- a test killed by faulthandler's timeout is more interesting to fix that a "common" failed test ;-)