How to Stop a Thread

How to properly stop the Thread in Java?

In the IndexProcessor class you need a way of setting a flag which informs the thread that it will need to terminate, similar to the variable run that you have used just in the class scope.

When you wish to stop the thread, you set this flag and call join() on the thread and wait for it to finish.

Make sure that the flag is thread safe by using a volatile variable or by using getter and setter methods which are synchronised with the variable being used as the flag.

public class IndexProcessor implements Runnable {

    private static final Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(IndexProcessor.class);
    private volatile boolean running = true;

    public void terminate() {
        running = false;
    }

    @Override
    public void run() {
        while (running) {
            try {
                LOGGER.debug("Sleeping...");
                Thread.sleep((long) 15000);

                LOGGER.debug("Processing");
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                LOGGER.error("Exception", e);
                running = false;
            }
        }

    }
}

Then in SearchEngineContextListener:

public class SearchEngineContextListener implements ServletContextListener {

    private static final Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(SearchEngineContextListener.class);

    private Thread thread = null;
    private IndexProcessor runnable = null;

    @Override
    public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent event) {
        runnable = new IndexProcessor();
        thread = new Thread(runnable);
        LOGGER.debug("Starting thread: " + thread);
        thread.start();
        LOGGER.debug("Background process successfully started.");
    }

    @Override
    public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent event) {
        LOGGER.debug("Stopping thread: " + thread);
        if (thread != null) {
            runnable.terminate();
            thread.join();
            LOGGER.debug("Thread successfully stopped.");
        }
    }
}

Is there any way to kill a Thread?

It is generally a bad pattern to kill a thread abruptly, in Python, and in any language. Think of the following cases:

• the thread is holding a critical resource that must be closed properly
• the thread has created several other threads that must be killed as well.

The nice way of handling this, if you can afford it (if you are managing your own threads), is to have an exit_request flag that each thread checks on a regular interval to see if it is time for it to exit.

For example:

import threading

class StoppableThread(threading.Thread):
    """Thread class with a stop() method. The thread itself has to check
    regularly for the stopped() condition."""

    def __init__(self,  *args, **kwargs):
        super(StoppableThread, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self._stop_event = threading.Event()

    def stop(self):
        self._stop_event.set()

    def stopped(self):
        return self._stop_event.is_set()

In this code, you should call stop() on the thread when you want it to exit, and wait for the thread to exit properly using join(). The thread should check the stop flag at regular intervals.

There are cases, however, when you really need to kill a thread. An example is when you are wrapping an external library that is busy for long calls, and you want to interrupt it.

The following code allows (with some restrictions) to raise an Exception in a Python thread:

def _async_raise(tid, exctype):
    '''Raises an exception in the threads with id tid'''
    if not inspect.isclass(exctype):
        raise TypeError("Only types can be raised (not instances)")
    res = ctypes.pythonapi.PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(ctypes.c_long(tid),
                                                     ctypes.py_object(exctype))
    if res == 0:
        raise ValueError("invalid thread id")
    elif res != 1:
        # "if it returns a number greater than one, you're in trouble,
        # and you should call it again with exc=NULL to revert the effect"
        ctypes.pythonapi.PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(ctypes.c_long(tid), None)
        raise SystemError("PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc failed")

class ThreadWithExc(threading.Thread):
    '''A thread class that supports raising an exception in the thread from
       another thread.
    '''
    def _get_my_tid(self):
        """determines this (self's) thread id

        CAREFUL: this function is executed in the context of the caller
        thread, to get the identity of the thread represented by this
        instance.
        """
        if not self.isAlive():
            raise threading.ThreadError("the thread is not active")

        # do we have it cached?
        if hasattr(self, "_thread_id"):
            return self._thread_id

        # no, look for it in the _active dict
        for tid, tobj in threading._active.items():
            if tobj is self:
                self._thread_id = tid
                return tid

        # TODO: in python 2.6, there's a simpler way to do: self.ident

        raise AssertionError("could not determine the thread's id")

    def raiseExc(self, exctype):
        """Raises the given exception type in the context of this thread.

        If the thread is busy in a system call (time.sleep(),
        socket.accept(), ...), the exception is simply ignored.

        If you are sure that your exception should terminate the thread,
        one way to ensure that it works is:

            t = ThreadWithExc( ... )
            ...
            t.raiseExc( SomeException )
            while t.isAlive():
                time.sleep( 0.1 )
                t.raiseExc( SomeException )

        If the exception is to be caught by the thread, you need a way to
        check that your thread has caught it.

        CAREFUL: this function is executed in the context of the
        caller thread, to raise an exception in the context of the
        thread represented by this instance.
        """
        _async_raise( self._get_my_tid(), exctype )

(Based on Killable Threads by Tomer Filiba. The quote about the return value of PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc appears to be from an old version of Python.)

As noted in the documentation, this is not a magic bullet because if the thread is busy outside the Python interpreter, it will not catch the interruption.

A good usage pattern of this code is to have the thread catch a specific exception and perform the cleanup. That way, you can interrupt a task and still have proper cleanup.

How to stop a thread from inside?

A thread terminates when its run method completes. The return statement terminates a method. Since method run returns no value, simply writing return in the if block will terminate the method and subsequently, the thread.

if(/* We don't meet certain requirements for continuing */) {
    return;
}

How to stop the thread execution in C++

thread.join() does not cause the thread to terminate, it waits until the thread ends. It's the responsibility of the thread to end its execution, for example by periodically checking for a certain condition, like a flag.

You already have an atomic flag bReading, which appears to cause the thread to exit.

        if (queueInput.empty()) {
            mtxQueueInput.unlock();
            if (bReading.load())
                continue;
            else
                break;  // thread will exit when queue is empty and bReading == false

So all you need is to set bReading = false in the outer thread before calling thread.join().

bReading = false;
reader.join();

Note that bReading.store(false); inside your thread will have no effect.

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Note: you don't need to call atomic.load() and atomic.store(), you can just use them in your code, which will call load() and store() implicitly.

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