Interrupt a thread in DatagramSocket.receive

Question

I\'m building an application that listens on both TCP and UDP, and I\'ve run into some trouble with my shutdown mechanism. When I call Thread.interrupt() on eac

Answer 1

DatagramSocket.receive blocks until it receives a datagram. Probably what you need to do is use setSoTimeout to make it timeout.

Answer 2

A common idiom for interrupting network IO is to close the channel. That would be a good bet if you need to effectively interrupt it while its waiting on sending or receiving.

public class InterruptableUDPThread extends Thread{

   private final DatagramSocket socket;

   public InterruptableUDPThread(DatagramSocket socket){
      this.socket = socket;
   }
   @Override
   public void interrupt(){
     super.interrupt();  
     this.socket.close();
   }
}

Answer 3

As far as I know, close() is the proper way to interrupt a blocked socket. Interrupting and keeping open something that may have already done a partial read or write makes things unnecessarily complex. It's easier to only have to deal with a "success" or "give up" result.