Waking up a sleeping thread - interrupt() versus “splitting” the sleep into multiple sleeps

Question

This requirement came up in my Android app, but it applies to Java in general. My app \"does something\" every few seconds. I have implemented this as follows (just relevant sni

Answer 1

This answer helped me do the job. Posting some code on how I achieved it. Of particular importance are startTask() and setInterval().

public class PeriodicTask {

    private volatile boolean running = true;
    private volatile int interval = 5;
    private final Object lockObj = new Object();

    public void startTask() {
        while (running) {
            doSomething();
            synchronized (lockObj) {
                try{
                    lockObj.wait(interval * 1000);
                } catch(InterruptedException e){
                    //Handle Exception
                }
            }
        }
    }

    public void stopTask() {
        this.running = false;
    }

    public void setInterval(int newInterval) {
        synchronized (lockObj) {
            this.interval = newInterval;
            lockObj.notify();
        }
    }
}