How to timeout a thread

Question

I want to run a thread for some fixed amount of time. If it is not completed within that time, I want to either kill it, throw some exception, or handle it in some way. How

Answer 1

I was looking for an ExecutorService that can interrupt all timed out Runnables executed by it, but found none. After a few hours I created one as below. This class can be modified to enhance robustness.

public class TimedExecutorService extends ThreadPoolExecutor {
    long timeout;
    public TimedExecutorService(int numThreads, long timeout, TimeUnit unit) {
        super(numThreads, numThreads, 0L, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS, new ArrayBlockingQueue(numThreads + 1));
        this.timeout = unit.toMillis(timeout);
    }

    @Override
    protected void beforeExecute(Thread thread, Runnable runnable) {
        Thread interruptionThread = new Thread(new Runnable() {
            @Override
            public void run() {
                try {
                    // Wait until timeout and interrupt this thread
                    Thread.sleep(timeout);
                    System.out.println("The runnable times out.");
                    thread.interrupt();
                } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                    e.printStackTrace();
                }
            }
        });
        interruptionThread.start();
    }
}

Usage:

public static void main(String[] args) {

    Runnable abcdRunnable = new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            System.out.println("abcdRunnable started");
            try {
                Thread.sleep(20000);
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                // logger.info("The runnable times out.");
            }
            System.out.println("abcdRunnable ended");
        }
    };

    Runnable xyzwRunnable = new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            System.out.println("xyzwRunnable started");
            try {
                Thread.sleep(20000);
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                // logger.info("The runnable times out.");
            }
            System.out.println("xyzwRunnable ended");
        }
    };

    int numThreads = 2, timeout = 5;
    ExecutorService timedExecutor = new TimedExecutorService(numThreads, timeout, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
    timedExecutor.execute(abcdRunnable);
    timedExecutor.execute(xyzwRunnable);
    timedExecutor.shutdown();
}