How to abort a Task like aborting a Thread (Thread.Abort method)?

Question

We could abort a Thread like this:

Thread thread = new Thread(SomeMethod);
.
.
.
thread.Abort();

But can I abort a Task (in .Net 4.0) in the same way not by cancellation mechanism. I want to kill the Task immediately.

Answer 1

The guidance on not using a thread abort is controversial. I think there is still a place for it but in exceptional circumstance. However you should always attempt to design around it and see it as a last resort.

Example;

You have a simple windows form application that connects to a blocking synchronous web service. Within which it executes a function on the web service within a Parallel loop.

CancellationTokenSource cts = new CancellationTokenSource();
ParallelOptions po = new ParallelOptions();
po.CancellationToken = cts.Token;
po.MaxDegreeOfParallelism = System.Environment.ProcessorCount;

Parallel.ForEach(iListOfItems, po, (item, loopState) =>
{

    Thread.Sleep(120000); // pretend web service call

});

Say in this example, the blocking call takes 2 mins to complete. Now I set my MaxDegreeOfParallelism to say ProcessorCount. iListOfItems has 1000 items within it to process.

The user clicks the process button and the loop commences, we have 'up-to' 20 threads executing against 1000 items in the iListOfItems collection. Each iteration executes on its own thread. Each thread will utilise a foreground thread when created by Parallel.ForEach. This means regardless of the main application shutdown, the app domain will be kept alive until all threads have finished.

However the user needs to close the application for some reason, say they close the form. These 20 threads will continue to execute until all 1000 items are processed. This is not ideal in this scenario, as the application will not exit as the user expects and will continue to run behind the scenes, as can be seen by taking a look in task manger.

Say the user tries to rebuild the app again (VS 2010), it reports the exe is locked, then they would have to go into task manager to kill it or just wait until all 1000 items are processed.

I would not blame you for saying, but of course! I should be cancelling these threads using the CancellationTokenSource object and calling Cancel ... but there are some problems with this as of .net 4.0. Firstly this is still never going to result in a thread abort which would offer up an abort exception followed by thread termination, so the app domain will instead need to wait for the threads to finish normally, and this means waiting for the last blocking call, which would be the very last running iteration (thread) that ultimately gets to call po.CancellationToken.ThrowIfCancellationRequested. In the example this would mean the app domain could still stay alive for up to 2 mins, even though the form has been closed and cancel called.

Note that Calling Cancel on CancellationTokenSource does not throw an exception on the processing thread(s), which would indeed act to interrupt the blocking call similar to a thread abort and stop the execution. An exception is cached ready for when all the other threads (concurrent iterations) eventually finish and return, the exception is thrown in the initiating thread (where the loop is declared).

I chose not to use the Cancel option on a CancellationTokenSource object. This is wasteful and arguably violates the well known anti-patten of controlling the flow of the code by Exceptions.

Instead, it is arguably 'better' to implement a simple thread safe property i.e. Bool stopExecuting. Then within the loop, check the value of stopExecuting and if the value is set to true by the external influence, we can take an alternate path to close down gracefully. Since we should not call cancel, this precludes checking CancellationTokenSource.IsCancellationRequested which would otherwise be another option.

Something like the following if condition would be appropriate within the loop;

if (loopState.ShouldExitCurrentIteration || loopState.IsExceptional || stopExecuting) {loopState.Stop(); return;}

The iteration will now exit in a 'controlled' manner as well as terminating further iterations, but as I said, this does little for our issue of having to wait on the long running and blocking call(s) that are made within each iteration (parallel loop thread), since these have to complete before each thread can get to the option of checking if it should stop.

In summary, as the user closes the form, the 20 threads will be signaled to stop via stopExecuting, but they will only stop when they have finished executing their long running function call.

We can't do anything about the fact that the application domain will always stay alive and only be released when all foreground threads have completed. And this means there will be a delay associated with waiting for any blocking calls made within the loop to complete.

Only a true thread abort can interrupt the blocking call, and you must mitigate leaving the system in a unstable/undefined state the best you can in the aborted thread's exception handler which goes without question. Whether that's appropriate is a matter for the programmer to decide, based on what resource handles they chose to maintain and how easy it is to close them in a thread's finally block. You could register with a token to terminate on cancel as a semi workaround i.e.

CancellationTokenSource cts = new CancellationTokenSource();
ParallelOptions po = new ParallelOptions();
po.CancellationToken = cts.Token;
po.MaxDegreeOfParallelism = System.Environment.ProcessorCount;

Parallel.ForEach(iListOfItems, po, (item, loopState) =>
{

    using (cts.Token.Register(Thread.CurrentThread.Abort))
    {
        Try
        {
           Thread.Sleep(120000); // pretend web service call          
        }
        Catch(ThreadAbortException ex)
        {
           // log etc.
        }
        Finally
        {
          // clean up here
        }
    }

});

but this will still result in an exception in the declaring thread.

All things considered, interrupt blocking calls using the parallel.loop constructs could have been a method on the options, avoiding the use of more obscure parts of the library. But why there is no option to cancel and avoid throwing an exception in the declaring method strikes me as a possible oversight.