Kill a polling HTTP request

Question

Hi All

I have a Runnable running inside a ThreadPoolExecutor long polling on an http request using the HttpClient .

So I am doing the request in a very way :

    httpClient = new HttpClient(new MultiThreadedHttpConnectionManager());
    clientParams.setSoTimeout(timeout);
    HttpMethodBase method = new GetMethod(request.toString());
    int iGetResultCode = 0;
    iGetResultCode = httpClient.executeMethod(method);

Now I really would like to cancel the polling from an other thread ( or somehow ).

shutdown is not really working , so maybe you know what else could I try.

Answer 1

Try the next one down in the documentation you linked - shutdownNow();

As the documentation says - this calls Thread.interrupt() on the thread in question which will cause it to throw an InterruptedException - you should properly handle this exception and not ignore it.

Answer 2

It is always a bad idea to try to kill a thread.

You should make the thread exit cleanly instead. Add a synchronized boolean field to check, if it is still OK to continue polling.

This still can leave the http request blocking to the socket. It might be OK to just leave this and just ignore the result after it returns. Alternative way is to close the socket from the other thread. (I don't know how to do it in this case.)

Answer 3

I'm with Stephen C on this one. httpclient.executeMethod looks like it should react to an InterruptedException (whether IO or other). If you are not seeing any exception propogation you can try closing the InputStream from the HttpClient.

method.getResponseBodyAsStream().close();

This should close the input stream reading from the website and also throw IOExceptions which the thread-pool thread will see. If the connection does close but you still do not see any IOException I would assume you are swallowing an exception somewhere