Killing thread after some specified time limit in Java

Is there a way to kill a child thread after some specified time limit in Java? Edit: Also this particular thread may be blocked in its worst case (Thread is used to wait for a file modification and blocks until this event occurs), so im not sure that interrupt() will be successful?

Make use of ExecutorService to execute the Callable, checkout the methods wherein you can specify the timeout. E.g.

ExecutorService executor = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor();
executor.invokeAll(Arrays.asList(new Task()), 10, TimeUnit.MINUTES); // Timeout of 10 minutes.
executor.shutdown();

Here Task of course implements Callable.

Some helpful changes were introduced as part of JEP 266 in CompletableFuture since Java 9. Using orTimeout method, for now, it is possible to write it like:

CompletableFuture.runAsync(thread::run)
    .orTimeout(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS)
    .exceptionally(throwable -> {
        log.error("An error occurred", throwable);
        return null;
    });

In Java 8, unfortunately, you should use some extra code. Here is an example of delegation pattern usage with help of Lombok:

import com.google.common.util.concurrent.ThreadFactoryBuilder;
import java.time.Duration;
import java.util.concurrent.CompletableFuture;
import java.util.concurrent.Executors;
import static java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit.MILLISECONDS;
import java.util.concurrent.TimeoutException;
import static lombok.AccessLevel.PRIVATE;
import lombok.AllArgsConstructor;
import lombok.experimental.Delegate;

@AllArgsConstructor(access = PRIVATE)
public class TimeoutableCompletableFuture<T> extends CompletableFuture<T> {

    public static TimeoutableCompletableFuture<Void> runAsync(
            Runnable runnable) {
        return new TimeoutableCompletableFuture<>(
                CompletableFuture.runAsync(runnable));
    }

    @Delegate
    private final CompletableFuture<T> baseFuture;

    public TimeoutableCompletableFuture<T> orTimeout(Duration duration) {
        final CompletableFuture<T> otherFuture = new CompletableFuture<>();
        Executors.newScheduledThreadPool(
                1,
                new ThreadFactoryBuilder()
                .setDaemon(true)
                .setNameFormat("timeoutable-%d")
                .build())
                .schedule(() -> {
                    TimeoutException ex = new TimeoutException(
                            "Timeout after " + duration);
                    return otherFuture.completeExceptionally(ex);
                }, duration.toMillis(), MILLISECONDS);

        return new TimeoutableCompletableFuture<>(
                baseFuture.applyToEither(otherFuture, a -> a));
    }
}

Of course, the code above easily could be rewritten as just a static factory method:

public static CompletableFuture<Void> runAsyncOrTimeout(
        Runnable runnable, long timeout, TimeUnit unit) {

    CompletableFuture<Void> other = new CompletableFuture<>();
    Executors.newScheduledThreadPool(
            1,
            new ThreadFactoryBuilder()
            .setDaemon(true)
            .setNameFormat("timeoutafter-%d")
            .build())
            .schedule(() -> {
                TimeoutException ex = new TimeoutException(
                        "Timeout after " + timeout);
                return other.completeExceptionally(ex);
            }, timeout, unit);
    return CompletableFuture.runAsync(runnable).applyToEither(other, a -> a);
}

Why not interrupt() it after a particular time ? Your spawned thread will have to be able to handle an InterruptedException properly.

See this article (http://www.javaspecialists.eu/archive/Issue056.html) for more information on shutting down threads cleanly.

See also the Executor/Future framework, which provide useful methods for collecting results and/or terminating threads within particular time limits.