How to start/stop/restart a thread in Java?

Once a thread stops you cannot restart it. However, there is nothing stopping you from creating and starting a new thread.

Option 1: Create a new thread rather than trying to restart.

Option 2: Instead of letting the thread stop, have it wait and then when it receives notification you can allow it to do work again. This way the thread never stops and will never need to be restarted.

Edit based on comment:

To "kill" the thread you can do something like the following.

yourThread.setIsTerminating(true); // tell the thread to stop
yourThread.join(); // wait for the thread to stop

Review java.lang.Thread.

To start or restart (once a thread is stopped, you can't restart that same thread, but it doesn't matter; just create a new Thread instance):

// Create your Runnable instance
Task task = new Task(...);

// Start a thread and run your Runnable
Thread t = new Thread(task);

To stop it, have a method on your Task instance that sets a flag to tell the run method to exit; returning from run exits the thread. If your calling code needs to know the thread really has stopped before it returns, you can use join:

// Tell Task to stop
task.setStopFlag(true);

// Wait for it to do so
t.join();

Regarding restarting: Even though a Thread can't be restarted, you can reuse your Runnable instance with a new thread if it has state and such you want to keep; that comes to the same thing. Just make sure your Runnable is designed to allow multiple calls to run.

It is impossible to terminate a thread unless the code running in that thread checks for and allows termination.

You said: "Sadly I must kill/restart it ... I don't have complete control over the contents of the thread and for my situation it requires a restart"

If the contents of the thread does not allow for termination of its exectuion then you can not terminate that thread.

In your post you said: "My first attempt was with ExecutorService but I can't seem to find a way for it restart a task. When I use .shutdownnow()..."

If you look at the source of "shutdownnow" it just runs through and interrupts the currently running threads. This will not stop their execution unless the code in those threads checks to see if it has been ineterrupted and, if so, stops execution itself. So shutdownnow is probably not doing what you think.

Let me illustrate what I mean when I say that the contents of the thread must allow for that thread to be terminated:

myExecutor.execute(new Runnable() {
 public void run() {
  while (true) {
    System.out.println("running");
  }
 }
 });
myExecutor.shutdownnow();

That thread will continue to run forever, even though shutdownnow was called, because it never checks to see if it has been terminated or not. This thread, however, will shut down:

myExecutor.execute(new Runnable() {
 public void run() {
  while (!Thread.interrupted()) {
    System.out.println("running");
  }
 }
 });
myExecutor.shutdownnow();

Since this thread checks to see whether or not it has been interrupted / shut down / terminated.

So if you want a thread that you can shut down, you need to make sure it checks to see if it has been interrupted. If you want a thread that you can "shut down" and "restart" you can make a runnable that can take new tasks as was mentioned before.

Why can you not shut down a running thread? Well I actually lied, you can call "yourThread.stop()" but why is this a bad idea? The thread could be in a synchronized (or other critical section, but we will limit ourselves to setions guarded by the syncrhonized key word here) section of code when you stop it. synch blocks are supposed to be executed in their entirity and only by one thread before being accessed by some other thread. If you stop a thread in the middle of a synch block, the protection put into place by the synch block is invalidated and your program will get into an unknown state. Developers make put stuff in synch blocks to keep things in synch, if you use threadInstance.stop() you destroy the meaning of synchronize, what the developer of that code was trying to accomplish and how the developer of that code expected his synchronized blocks to behave.

You can't restart a thread so your best option is to save the current state of the object at the time the thread was stopped and when operations need to continue on that object you can recreate that object using the saved and then start the new thread.

These two articles Swing Worker and Concurrency may help you determine the best solution for your problem.