Sentry is noisy on process exit

We are using Sentry to report errors from cron tasks. We have MAILTO set as a backup so that we receive emails about critical errors which happen before raven has a chance to initialize.

This leads to us getting the occasional email containing:

Sentry is attempting to send 1 pending error messages
Waiting up to 10 seconds
Press Ctrl-C to quit

It happens because there’s a hardcoded initial_timeout of 0.1 seconds in the process exit hook. Is there any chance you could make this timeout configurable the way shutdown_timeout is?

[whatisaphone]

https://github.com/getsentry/raven-python/blob/a698fc406d2e0f26616f0163b2b22e1a3a5b30f5/raven/transport/threaded.py#L62

             timeout = self.options['shutdown_timeout']
-
-            # wait briefly, initially
-            initial_timeout = min(0.1, timeout)
+            initial_timeout = self.options['initial_timeout']

             if not self._timed_queue_join(initial_timeout):

Who will be the hero?

---

If you guys really want to hardcode this timeout and send to stdout, I thought of an alternative that would also solve the problem. Instead of unconditionally sending this through stdout where it will clobber your program output, send it through Python’s logging framework with a suitably unique logger name such as raven.shutdown_flush. Then add a default handler for that logger during module init that sends the output to stdout. This would result in no change in the default behavior, but it would let users of the library override the default and route the message to wherever suits them best. @kornsn can send it to stderr in his apps, and the 10 people who 👍’d the issue can send it to NullHandler. Everybody wins.

[kornsn]

Is it ok if this noise will be printed to stderr? I want to do so, but I’m not sure if it’s enough.