AsyncTask threads never die

I'm using AsyncTasks to fetch data in response to the user pressing a button. This works well and keeps the interface responsive while fetching the data, but when I checked out what was going on in the Eclipse debugger, I found out that every time a new AsyncTask was created (which is quite often, because they can only be used once), a new thread was being created but never terminated.

The result is a large number of AsyncTask threads just sitting there. I'm not sure if this is a problem in practice or not, but I'd really like to get rid of those extra threads.

How can I kill these threads?

Solution 1:

AsyncTask manages a thread pool, created with ThreadPoolExecutor. It will have from 5 to 128 threads. If there are more than 5 threads, those extra threads will stick around for at most 10 seconds before being removed. (note: these figures are for the presently-visible open source code and vary by Android release).

Leave the AsyncTask threads alone, please.

Solution 2:

In addition to CommonsWare's response:

Currently I'm using Android 2.2, and my application uses no more than one AsyncTask at any time, but I'm creating a new one every x minutes. At first new AsyncTask Threads start to appear (a new Thread for a new AsyncTask) but after 5 threads (as mentioned by CommonsWare) they just stay visible in the debug window, and get re-used when new AsyncTask threads are needed. They just stay there until the debugger disconnects.

Solution 3:

Same symptom here. In my case the threads hanged around after I'd killed the Activity, and I was hoping for the App to close completely. Problem partly solved by using a single threaded executor:

    myActiveTask.executeOnExecutor(Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor());

This made the thread to vanish after the completing its work.