CODEWITHSUNDEEP
java
randomafk
randomafk

Reputation: 783

Java interrupts

I'm trying to implement a sort of interrupt process into my java program so that if an operation takes longer than 5 minutes, i can kill it.

Is there any sort of generic way I can do this? I'm using an external API to carry out very processor intensive calculations and it already multithreads the process so can I still use the executor class to do this?

-edit-

Ended up solving it by using a bash script wrapper function. It kills the PID after a timeout.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 296

Answers (2)

Crollster
Crollster

Reputation: 2771

Depending on how your thread is coded (ie. whether it would properly terminate when interrupted), you could use the provided Thread.join(millis) or Thread.join(mills, nanos) method calls.

Something like this:

Thread myThread

// ... start myThread

myThread.join(300000); // 5mins in millis

if (myThread.isAlive()) {
    myThread.interrupt();
}

Inside the thread itself, you would want to ensure that you .yield() at relevant points and properly handle an InterruptedException to allow this kind of logic to work.

Of course this is an "ideal" kinda situation - if the thread is blocked due to some outside process, and cannot handle the .interrupt(), then it will not work very well.

HTH

Upvotes: 1

pra9ma
pra9ma

Reputation: 388

It's considered unsafe to kill or forcefully stop a Thread because it may leave the program in an undetermined state, which will later cause a crash or other more serious problem. Instead, you should design your worker thread to periodically check the interrupt flag via Thread#isInterrupted or Thread#interrupted and exit if it is set. Then, using another thread, you can signal to the worker thread that it should stop by calling interrupt() on the worker thread, which will result in the worker thread detecting the interrupt or possibly receiving an InterruptedException if it is blocking inside your code or the third party code.

Upvotes: 3

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