If you are using zeromq >= 3.0, then you can set the RCVTIMEO socket option:
client_receiver.RCVTIMEO = 1000 # in milliseconds
But in general, you can use pollers:
poller = zmq.Poller()
poller.register(client_receiver, zmq.POLLIN) # POLLIN for recv, POLLOUT for send
And poller.poll() takes a timeout:
evts = poller.poll(1000) # wait *up to* one second for a message to arrive.
evts will be an empty list if there is nothing to receive.
You can poll with zmq.POLLOUT, to check if a send will succeed.
Or, to handle the case of a peer that might have failed, a:
worker.send(msg, zmq.NOBLOCK)
might suffice, which will always return immediately – raising a ZMQError(zmq.EAGAIN) if the send could not complete.