Stop/Interrupt threads blocked on waiting input from socket

Question

As the title says I need a way to stop or interrupt a thread that is blocked waiting on an input from the socket.

Answer 1

I didn't see socket.closeInput(). However, I did find socket.shutdownInput(). After calling that (from a different thread that was blocking on the read naturally), my call to bufferedReader.close() worked fine! (I followed that with calls to printWriter.close() and socket.close().

Answer 2

Try using sock.closeInput() followed by sock.close()

Answer 3

Thread.interrupt() should be the method you're looking for. Be sure that your input-accessing methods also check for InterruptedException and ClosedByInterruptException.

Also look at the corresponding page in the Sun Concurrency Tutorial, as another solution suggests.

Answer 4

Close the socket and the read will be unblocked (will exit with a subclass of IOException). Read reacting to Thread.interrupt is platform dependent (won't work on Solaris 10 for example).

Answer 5

You could simply close() the IO stream/socket from another thread. Then, you could check on a volatile boolean field if the resulting IOException is due the close or something else. I think the close might result in an java.net.SocketException: Socket closed exception.

Answer 6

Sockets allow to set a timeout via the setSoTimeout() method. This is the preferred way to stop them blocking.

Otherwise you might want to have a look at the nio package which allows for non-blocking I/O at the expense of more manual work to manage incoming and outgoing data.