[eurleif]

>In practical terms this forces you to have the protected code path to be "real time", which is, guaranteed to terminate (or to abort) without the specified time.

You could keep re-acquiring the lock when it gets close to expiring, and stop your process if the lock becomes un-acquirable.

[antirez]

Yes, this is a good strategy. We are even guaranteed to be able to re-acquire the log if we send the reacquire request in time, and there are no new partitions, because in order to reacquire the lock it is possible to send a script that checks if the value matches, and if so, we can extend the expire of the keys. Basically it is possible for the lock holder to reacquire by extending the duration of the previous lock before it expires.