Question

I am working on a multithreaded game in java. I have several worker threads that fetch modules from a central thread manager, which then executes it on its own. Now I would like to be able to pause such a thread if it temporarily has nothing to execute. I have tried calling the wait() method on it from the thread manager, but that only resulted in it ignoring the notify() call that followed it.

I googled a bit on it too, only finding that most sites refer to functions like suspend(), pause(), etc, which are now marked a deprecated on the java documentation pages.

So in general, what is the way to pause or continue a thread on demand?

Answer 1

You can use an if block in the thread with a sentinal variable that is set to false if you want to halt the thread’s action. This works best if the thread is performing loops.