ExecutorService, how to wait for all tasks to finish

Question

What is the simplest way to to wait for all tasks of ExecutorService to finish? My task is primarily computational, so I just want to run a large number of jobs - one on each core. Right now my setup looks like this:

ExecutorService es = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(2);
for (DataTable singleTable : uniquePhrases) {   
    es.execute(new ComputeDTask(singleTable));
}
try{
    es.wait();
} 
catch (InterruptedException e){
    e.printStackTrace();
}

ComputeDTask implements runnable. This appears to execute the tasks correctly, but the code crashes on wait() with IllegalMonitorStateException. This is odd, because I played around with some toy examples and it appeared to work.

uniquePhrases contains several tens of thousands of elements. Should I be using another method? I am looking for something as simple as possible

Answer 1

The simplest approach is to use ExecutorService.invokeAll() which does what you want in a one-liner. In your parlance, you'll need to modify or wrap ComputeDTask to implement Callable<>, which can give you quite a bit more flexibility. Probably in your app there is a meaningful implementation of Callable.call(), but here's a way to wrap it if not using Executors.callable().

ExecutorService es = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(2);
List<Callable<Object>> todo = new ArrayList<Callable<Object>>(singleTable.size());

for (DataTable singleTable: uniquePhrases) { 
    todo.add(Executors.callable(new ComputeDTask(singleTable))); 
}

List<Future<Object>> answers = es.invokeAll(todo);

As others have pointed out, you could use the timeout version of invokeAll() if appropriate. In this example, answers is going to contain a bunch of Futures which will return nulls (see definition of Executors.callable(). Probably what you want to do is a slight refactoring so you can get a useful answer back, or a reference to the underlying ComputeDTask, but I can't tell from your example.

If it isn't clear, note that invokeAll() will not return until all the tasks are completed. (i.e., all the Futures in your answers collection will report .isDone() if asked.) This avoids all the manual shutdown, awaitTermination, etc... and allows you to reuse this ExecutorService neatly for multiple cycles, if desired.

There are a few related questions on SO:

• How to wait for all threads to finish

• Return values from java threads

• invokeAll() not willing to accept a Collection<Callable<t>>

• Do I need to synchronize?

None of these are strictly on-point for your question, but they do provide a bit of color about how folks think Executor/ExecutorService ought to be used.