How to shutdown an ExecutorService?

Question

Whenever I call shutdownNow() or shutdown() it doesn't shut down. I read of a few threads where it said that shutting down is not guaranteed - can someone provide me a good way of doing it?

Answer 1

The typical pattern is:

executorService.shutdownNow();
executorService.awaitTermination();

When calling shutdownNow, the executor will (generally) try to interrupt the threads that it manages. To make the shutdown graceful, you need to catch the interrupted exception in the threads or check the interrupted status. If you don't your threads will run forever and your executor will never be able to shutdown. This is because the interruption of threads in Java is a collaborative process (i.e. the interrupted code must do something when asked to stop, not the interrupting code).

For example, the following code prints Exiting normally.... But if you comment out the line if (Thread.currentThread().isInterrupted()) break;, it will print Still waiting... because the threads within the executor are still running.

public static void main(String args[]) throws InterruptedException {
    ExecutorService executor = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(1);
    executor.submit(new Runnable() {

        @Override
        public void run() {
            while (true) {
                if (Thread.currentThread().isInterrupted()) break;
            }
        }
    });

    executor.shutdownNow();
    if (!executor.awaitTermination(100, TimeUnit.MICROSECONDS)) {
        System.out.println("Still waiting...");
        System.exit(0);
    }
    System.out.println("Exiting normally...");
}

Alternatively, it could be written with an InterruptedException like this:

public static void main(String args[]) throws InterruptedException {
    ExecutorService executor = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(1);
    executor.submit(new Runnable() {

        @Override
        public void run() {
            try {
                while (true) {Thread.sleep(10);}
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                //ok let's get out of here
            }
        }
    });

    executor.shutdownNow();
    if (!executor.awaitTermination(100, TimeUnit.MICROSECONDS)) {
        System.out.println("Still waiting...");
        System.exit(0);
    }
    System.out.println("Exiting normally...");
}