Setting a maximum execution time for a method/thread

Question

I have a method, which writes to the database. The requirement is to make sure that this method does not execute after a certain time elapses. If it returns before that, then nothing should be done.

The one basic approach that I can think of is doing something like this.

public class LimitedRuntime {

    public static void writeToDb(){
            // writes to the database
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        long totalExecutionTime = 8000L;
        long startTime = System.currentTimeMillis();

        while(System.currentTimeMillis() - startTime < totalExecutionTime )
        {
            writeToDb();
        }   
    }
}

One problem with this approach is that even if the method returns before the max total execution time, even then the program halts so as to wait for the time to elapse.

How can I do this better (or maybe more correctly) ? And if we use Thread, how can we find out which Thread executes that method ?

Answer 1

You can do this by sending your job to an executor:

 public static void main(String[] args) {
    ExecutorService executor = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(4);

    Future<?> future = executor.submit(new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            writeToDb();            //        <-- your job
        }
    });

    executor.shutdown();            //        <-- reject all further submissions

    try {
        future.get(8, TimeUnit.SECONDS);  //     <-- wait 8 seconds to finish
    } catch (InterruptedException e) {    //     <-- possible error cases
        System.out.println("job was interrupted");
    } catch (ExecutionException e) {
        System.out.println("caught exception: " + e.getCause());
    } catch (TimeoutException e) {
        future.cancel(true);              //     <-- interrupt the job
        System.out.println("timeout");
    }

    // wait all unfinished tasks for 2 sec
    if(!executor.awaitTermination(2, TimeUnit.SECONDS)){
        // force them to quit by interrupting
        executor.shutdownNow();
    }
}

Answer 2

There is also an AspectJ solution for that with jcabi-aspects library:

@Timeable(limit = 5, unit = TimeUnit.SECONDS)
public String writeToDb() {
  // writeToDb
}

There is an article explaining it further: Limit Java Method Execution Time