How to wait for all tasks in an ThreadPoolExecutor to finish without shutting down the Executor?

cottonBallPaws picture cottonBallPaws · Oct 14, 2010 · Viewed 61.4k times · Source

I can't use shutdown() and awaitTermination() because it is possible new tasks will be added to the ThreadPoolExecutor while it is waiting.

So I'm looking for a way to wait until the ThreadPoolExecutor has emptied it's queue and finished all of it's tasks without stopping new tasks from being added before that point.

If it makes any difference, this is for Android.

Thanks

Update: Many weeks later after revisiting this, I discovered that a modified CountDownLatch worked better for me in this case. I'll keep the answer marked because it applies more to what I asked.

Answer

Tim Bender picture Tim Bender · Oct 14, 2010

If you are interested in knowing when a certain task completes, or a certain batch of tasks, you may use ExecutorService.submit(Runnable). Invoking this method returns a Future object which may be placed into a Collection which your main thread will then iterate over calling Future.get() for each one. This will cause your main thread to halt execution until the ExecutorService has processed all of the Runnable tasks.

Collection<Future<?>> futures = new LinkedList<Future<?>>();
futures.add(executorService.submit(myRunnable));
for (Future<?> future:futures) {
    future.get();
}