Thread sleep and thread join.
- by Dhruv Gairola
hi guys,
if i put a thread to sleep in a loop, netbeans gives me a caution saying Invoking Thread.sleep in loop can cause performance problems. However, if i were to replace the sleep with join, no such caution is given. Both versions compile and work fine tho. My code is below (check the last few lines for "Thread.sleep() vs t.join()").
public class Test{
//Display a message, preceded by the name of the current thread
static void threadMessage(String message) {
String threadName = Thread.currentThread().getName();
System.out.format("%s: %s%n", threadName, message);
}
private static class MessageLoop implements Runnable {
public void run() {
String importantInfo[] = {
"Mares eat oats",
"Does eat oats",
"Little lambs eat ivy",
"A kid will eat ivy too"
};
try {
for (int i = 0; i < importantInfo.length; i++) {
//Pause for 4 seconds
Thread.sleep(4000);
//Print a message
threadMessage(importantInfo[i]);
}
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
threadMessage("I wasn't done!");
}
}
}
public static void main(String args[]) throws InterruptedException {
//Delay, in milliseconds before we interrupt MessageLoop
//thread (default one hour).
long patience = 1000 * 60 * 60;
//If command line argument present, gives patience in seconds.
if (args.length > 0) {
try {
patience = Long.parseLong(args[0]) * 1000;
} catch (NumberFormatException e) {
System.err.println("Argument must be an integer.");
System.exit(1);
}
}
threadMessage("Starting MessageLoop thread");
long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
Thread t = new Thread(new MessageLoop());
t.start();
threadMessage("Waiting for MessageLoop thread to finish");
//loop until MessageLoop thread exits
while (t.isAlive()) {
threadMessage("Still waiting...");
//Wait maximum of 1 second for MessageLoop thread to
//finish.
/*******LOOK HERE**********************/
Thread.sleep(1000);//issues caution unlike t.join(1000)
/**************************************/
if (((System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime) > patience) &&
t.isAlive()) {
threadMessage("Tired of waiting!");
t.interrupt();
//Shouldn't be long now -- wait indefinitely
t.join();
}
}
threadMessage("Finally!");
}
}
As i understand it, join waits for the other thread to complete, but in this case, arent both sleep and join doing the same thing? Then why does netbeans throw the caution?
