I thought that calling timed_receive() would just time out in this case, but instead it gets stuck attempting to lock a mutex.
So is there a function that I can call on my que, before attempting to receive data, which tells me if the sending process has died or is halted?
There is no generic method to know whether the counter-party, died, halted, partially locked (eg one of the threads is in an infinite loop), playing possum, or just being adversarial. If the counter-party is cooperative, you can communicate with heartbeats and rely on them to decide if it responsive.
The fact that your program is "stuck" attempting to lock a mutex (are you sure that that's the case?) can indicate that,
The timed_receive succeeds, times out, or throws as expected:
bool timed_receive(void * buffer, std::size_t buffer_size,
std::size_t & recvd_size, unsigned int & priority,
const boost::posix_time::ptime & abs_time);
Receives a message from the message queue. The message is stored in buffer "buffer", which has size "buffer_size". The received message has size "recvd_size" and priority "priority". If the message queue is empty the receiver retries until time "abs_time" is reached. Returns true if the message has been successfully sent. Returns false if timeout is reached. Throws interprocess_error on error.
Also make sure you pass an absolute timeout value.
