Re: Java Child Threads

From:

Daniel Pitts <newsgroup.spamfilter@virtualinfinity.net>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 14:00:01 -0800

Message-ID:

<47bb515a$0$21706$7836cce5@newsrazor.net>

Hugo wrote:

Here is a conundrum...

User authenticates to a web application.....Parent thread is created.

At some point during the user's interaction with the application, I
would like to create a child thread that can perform a task
independent of the parent thread. Whether the child thread is
successful or not should be irrelevant to the parent thread.

And the execution of the child thread's task should not delay the
parent thread....i.e. the parent thread should not wait until the
child thread completes its task.

Is this possible in Java...any pointers on hows to get this started?

Its quite possible, even easy.

One thing to consider though, is what happens if you get "slammed" by
traffic. Often times web containers will pool their main threads and
block incoming connections until a thread becomes available. If you are
spinning off these child threads without any consideration, you may
overload the JVM with threads. If it is a small tool used internally to
your company, don't worry too much about it. If it is a webapp that
serves a high-volume web-site, check out ThreadPoolExecutor and the likes.

Whatever you decide to do, I *strongly* recommend you read the book Java
Concurrency in Practice. It describes all the tools available to Java
programmers and most of the caveats of multi-threaded applications in
the Java platform.
<http://virtualinfinity.net/wordpress/technical-book-recommendations/java-concurrency-in-practice/>

--
Daniel Pitts' Tech Blog: <http://virtualinfinity.net/wordpress/>