We Keep Coding

ExecutorService should wait until batch of taksk is finished before starting again

The Problem:
I am parsing a large log file (around 625_000_000 lines) and saving it into the database.
public class LogScheduler {
static int fileNumber = 1;
public Importer(IRequestService service) {
this.service = service;
}
#Override
public void run() {
try {
service.saveAll(getRequestListFromFile("segment_directory/Log_segment_"+fileNumber+".txt"));
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
The method that runs this thread is:
public void scheduledDataSave() throws InterruptedException {
int availableCores = Runtime.getRuntime().availableProcessors();
String directory = "segment_directory";
int filesInDirectory = Objects.requireNonNull(new File(directory).list()).length;
ExecutorService executorService = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(availableCores);
for (int i = 1; i <= filesInDirectory; i++) {
executorService.execute(new Importer(service));
}
executorService.shutdown();
}
Inserting the Thread.sleep(); method after the executorService.execute(new Importer(service)); sleeps after the execution of every thread, and not 8 threads like it should since they are in the Executorservice
And I have no idea why that happens since it should not behave like that.
From what I understand, the ExecutorService should run 8 threads in parallel, finish them, sleep, and start the pool again.
How to "sleep" after every 8 threads?

Sleeping the thread submitting tasks does not sleep the submitted tasks
Your question is not clear, but apparently centers around your expectation that adding a Thread.sleep after each call to executorService.execute would sleep all the threads of the executor service.
for ( int i = 1 ; i <= filesInDirectory ; i++ ) {
executorService.execute( new Importer( service ) ); // Executor service assigns this task to one of the background threads in its backing pool of threads.
Thread.sleep( Duration.ofMillis( 100 ).toMillis() ) ; // Sleeping this thread doing the looping. *Not* sleeping the background threads managed by the executor service.
}
Your expectation in incorrect.
That Thread.sleep is sleeping the thread doing the for loop.
The executor service has its own backing pool of threads. Those threads are not affected by a Thread.sleep is some other thread. Those background threads will only sleep if you call Thread.sleep within the code running on each of those threads.
So you are feeding the first task to the executor service. The executor service immediately dispatches that work to one of its backing threads. That task is immediately executed (if a thread is available immediately, and not otherwise occupied by previous tasks).
After assigning that task, your for loop sleeps for a hundred milliseconds, in this example code shown here. While the for loop is asleep, no further tasks are being assigned to the executor service. But while the for loop is asleep, the submitted task is executing on a background thread. That background thread is not sleeping.
Eventually, your for loop thread wakes, assigns a second task, and goes back to sleep. Meanwhile the background thread executes at full speed ahead.
So sleeping the thread submitting tasks does not sleep tasks already submitted.
Waiting for submitted tasks to complete
Your title asks:
ExecutorService should wait until batch of taksk is finished before starting again
After submitting your tasks, call shutdown and awaitTermination on your executor service. After those calls, your code blocks, waiting until all the submitted tasks are are completed/canceled/failed.
ExecutorService executorService = Executors.newVirtualThreadExecutor() ;
… submit tasks to that executor service …
executorService.shutdown() ;
executorSerivce.awaitTermination() ; // At this point, the flow-of-control blocks until the submitted tasks are done.
System.out.println( "INFO - Tasks on background threads are done. " + Instant.now() );
I would suggest using the ExecutorService#submit method rather than ExecutorService#execute method. The difference is that the first method returns a Future object. You can collect these Future objects as you submit tasks to the executor service. After the shutdown & awaitTermination, you can examine your collection of Future objects to check their completion status.
Project Loom
If Project Loom succeeds, such code will be a bit simpler and more clear. Experimental builds of Project Loom technology are available now, based on early-access Java 17. The Loom team seeks feedback now.
With Project Loom, ExecutorService becomes AutoCloseable. This means we can use try-with-resources syntax to automatically call a new close method on ExecutorService. This close method first blocks until all the tasks are completed/canceled/failed, then shuts down the executor service. No need to call shutdown nor awaitTermination.
By the way, Project Loom also bring virtual threads (fibers). This is likely to dramatically increase the performance of your code because it involves much blocking for storage i/o and database access.
try (
ExecutorService executorService = Executors.newVirtualThreadExecutor() ;
)
{
… submit tasks to that executor service …
}
// At this point, with Project Loom technology, the flow-of-control blocks until the submitted tasks are done.
// Also, the `ExecutorService` is automatically closed/shutdown by this point, via try-with-resources syntax.
System.out.println( "INFO - Tasks on background threads are done. " + Instant.now() );
With Project Loom, you can collect the returned Future objects in the same manner as discussed above to examine completion status.
You have other issues in your code. But you've not disclosed enough to address them all.

How to "sleep" after every 8 threads?
So if you are doing something like this, then it isn't doing what you think.
for (int i = 1; i <= filesInDirectory; i++) {
executorService.execute(new Importer(service));
Thread.sleep(...);
}
This causes the thread which is starting the background jobs to sleep and does not affect the running on each of the jobs. I believe what you are missing is to wait for the thread-pool to finish:
executorService.shutdown();
executorService.awaitTermination(Long.MAX_VALUE, TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS);
This waits for all of the jobs in the thread-pool to complete before continuing.
One more thing. I use executorService.submit(...) versus execute(...). Here's a description of their difference. For me, one additional difference is that any exceptions thrown by tasks run with execute(...) cause the running thread to terminate and possibly be restarted. With submit(...) it allows you to get that exception if needed and stops the threads from having to be respawned unnecessarily.
If you explain a bit more about what you are trying to accomplish, we should be able to help.

ExecutorService not terminating in time

I have an ExecutorService that runs a few threads.
What I am trying to accomplish is to execute, and then wait for all threads to terminate. To give you more background, every thread1 connects to a website.
This is what I came up with:
public static void terminateExecutor(ExecutorService taskExecutor) {
taskExecutor.shutdown();
try {
taskExecutor.awaitTermination(2, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
System.out.println("Some tasks were interrupted!"); //This gets printed
}
}
Now, strangely enough, the main thread that uses the ExecutorService terminates, but the thread1s in it don't.
I noticed this because thread1 threw an error (the main thread at this point was already dead) telling me that it didn't find the URL specified (so I guess it's something related to connections).
Is it possible that awaitTermination doesn't terminate the thread1 because its trying (and retrying it seems) to connect to an invalid link?
I cannot stop the thread1 in any other way (or at least to my knowledge I can't), because there isn't any kind of loop.
EDIT:
I get thread1 by creating a new class and feeding it to the executor.
for (....)
{
String urlToVisit = globalUrl + links.get(i);
Thread thread1 = new MagicalThread(urlToVisit, 2).getThread();
executor.execute(thread1);
}
terminateExecutor(executor.getExecutor());

From the Javadoc (emphasis mine):
Blocks until all tasks have completed execution after a shutdown request
You need to call shutdown() before calling awaitTermination, otherwise it does nothing meaningful.

The executor uses interruption to let the threads know it's time to quit. If your tasks are using blocking I/O then they will be blocked and can't check the interrupt flag. There is no ability for the blocked task to respond to the interruption in the way that happens with sleep or wait, where interruption causes the threads to wake up and throw an InterruptedException.
If you set a timeout on the socket then, once the socket times out, the task can check for interruption. Also you can have the task respond to interrupt by closing the socket. See https://www.javaspecialists.eu/archive/Issue056.html
Be aware that implementing this in a threadpool is more involved than in the example given in the linked article. Nothing about the executor lets the pool call methods on a task besides run. One way to do it would be to put a reference to the socket in a ThreadLocal. Then you could make a ThreadFactory for the pool to use to subclass Thread with a method that overrides the interrupt method on the thread to get the socket from the ThreadLocal and close it.

When
taskExecutor.awaitTermination(2, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
returns, it doesn't guarantee that the ExecutorService has terminated. Look at its return value:
[Returns] true if this executor terminated and false if the timeout elapsed before termination
You don't check this value, but I'll bet it's returning false if the thing you're running in the ExecutorService is still running.

ExecutorService: awaitTermination VS while loop

I have to wait for completion of all the threads in an executorService.
Should I use
while(!executor.isTerminated()){...} or
executor.awaitTermination(...)?
What are the pros and cons of these ways?

With executor.isTerminated() your current thread will keep running.
with executor.awaitTermination() the current thread will be blocked.
So it depends on what you want to do in your current thread.
Do you want to do some tasks and periodically check for whether the executor is done, then use executor.isTerminated()?
Or Is the current thread just waiting for the executor to finish. If yes, executor.awaitTermination() makes much more sense.
Do note that an Executor will only be terminated if the shutdown() or shutdownNow() is called.

Recommended way from oracle documentation link:
void shutdownAndAwaitTermination(ExecutorService pool) {
pool.shutdown(); // Disable new tasks from being submitted
try {
// Wait a while for existing tasks to terminate
if (!pool.awaitTermination(60, TimeUnit.SECONDS)) {
pool.shutdownNow(); // Cancel currently executing tasks
// Wait a while for tasks to respond to being cancelled
if (!pool.awaitTermination(60, TimeUnit.SECONDS))
System.err.println("Pool did not terminate");
}
} catch (InterruptedException ie) {
// (Re-)Cancel if current thread also interrupted
pool.shutdownNow();
// Preserve interrupt status
Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
}
}
if your threads are not completing with-in 120 seconds, you can change second if condition as :
while(!pool.awaitTermination(60, TimeUnit.SECONDS)) {
Thread.sleep(60000);
}
You can find other alternatives at # wait until all threads finish their work in java
One more key note on usage of isTerminated:
boolean isTerminated()
Returns true if all tasks have completed following shut down. Note that isTerminated is never true unless either shutdown or shutdownNow was called first.

ExecutorService - How to wait for completition of all tasks in non-blocking style

I am using ExecutorService in Java web server application for executing some computational tasks in parallel style and then calling shutdown() with awaitTermination() to wait for all tasks to be done. Whole computation can sometimes take dozens of minutes.
The thing is awaitTermination() method blocks the main thread until timeout elapsed (or interrupted) but I just want to start the tasks and immediatedly respond to client and after competition of all tasks shutdown the service (following conventions to always close the thread pool).
So my question, is there a way how I can be notified when all tasks are done so I could call the shutdown() method? Listener or something..
Thanks!

You are trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Consider the documentation of ExecutorService.shutdown():
Initiates an orderly shutdown in which previously submitted tasks are executed, but no new tasks will be accepted. …
This method does not wait for previously submitted tasks to complete execution.
In other words, just calling shutdown() does already everything you want
It finishes all previously submitted tasks
It initiates a shutdown
It does not wait
The only obstacle is that you are calling awaitTermination despite the fact that you don’t want to wait, which has a trivial solution: don’t call awaitTermination.
The confusion arises because in your question you are asking “how I can be notified when all tasks are done so I could call the shutdown() method” but that is in contradiction to what you are actually doing in the code. You are calling awaitTermination after shutDown so you are not waiting in order to initiate the shutdown, but initiating the shutdown first and waiting for its completion then, which is the purpose of awaitTermination, waiting for the completion of the shutdown.
To put it in one sentence, just call shutDown after submission in order to shutdown the service after completion of all submitted jobs and don’t call awaitTermination unless you really want to wait for the termination.

Thanks to comment from VGR I solved my problem with creating yet another Thread in which I wrapped my existing code like this:
Thread thread = new Thread(() -> {
ExecutorService service = Executors.newCachedThreadPool();
collection.forEach(item -> service.submit(() -> {
// some computational work
});
try {
service.shutdown()
service.awaitTermination(2, TimeUnit.HOURS);
catch (InterruptedException iEx) {
// handle exception
}
});
thread.start();
return ResponseToClient();

Interrupt when waiting on a blocking queue

I have a Runnable that runs from an Executor.
The runnable is blocked waiting in an SychronousQueue.take. How can I make sure the take will be interrupted when I do executor.shutdown?

+1 to #Eugene. ExecutorService.shutdown() shuts the thread-pool down but any submitted jobs will continue to run until they finish. If you use shutdownNow() instead, it will actually interrupt the threads. This doesn't mean that they will stop immediately but it does mean that if they are blocked in queue.take() or their next call to queue.take() it will throw an InterruptedException so the thread can exit.
To quote from the Javadocs:
Attempts to stop all actively executing tasks, halts the processing of waiting tasks, and returns a list of the tasks that were awaiting execution.
There are no guarantees beyond best-effort attempts to stop processing actively executing tasks. For example, typical implementations will cancel via Thread.interrupt(), so any task that fails to respond to interrupts may never terminate.
When your threads are calling queue.take() they should have something like the following code:
try {
work = queue.take();
...
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
// re-interrupt the thread which is always a good pattern
Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
// quit the processing thread
return;
}

You can do something like this may be?
executor.shutdown();
if (!executor.awaitTermination(SHUTDOWN_TIME)) {
executor.shutdownNow();
}

As specified in the javadoc of take it will throw an InterruptedException when the thread waiting is interrupted. So you need to make sure that your executor implementation will call Thread.interrupt() on all it's owning threads on shutdown.