When does Java's Thread.sleep throw InterruptedException?

Question

When does Java's Thread.sleep throw InterruptedException? Is it safe to ignore it? I am not doing any multithreading. I just want to wait for a few seconds before retrying some operation.

Answer 1

You should generally NOT ignore the exception. Take a look at the following paper:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp05236.html

Answer 2

A solid and easy way to handle it in single threaded code would be to catch it and retrow it in a RuntimeException, to avoid the need to declare it for every method.

Answer 3

The Java Specialists newsletter (which I can unreservedly recommend) had an interesting article on this, and how to handle the InterruptedException. It's well worth reading and digesting.