Question

I have a reentrant lock which I am wrapping in a customized class for my own needs. However due to the nature of the application a thread holding the lock to the reentrant lock gets stuck (external failures) and fails to release the reentrant lock.

I am wondering if there is a method to explicitly unlock the reentrant lock? I know the API for Reentrant lock does not have such a method – however I was thinking of introducing a timer task which will unlock the Reentrant lock after a set period of time OR kill the thread which holds the reentrant lock.

Any other suggestions in trying to force unlock my reentrant lock? My solutions are pretty thus I ask.

Answer 1

Instead of unlocking externally, I would execute the blocking code in a separate thread and have it timeout

something like this

Future<MyTask>future = taskExecutor.submit(myTask)
try {
    future.get(5,TimeUnit.Seconds);
    ...
    }
    catch (Exception e)
    {
        future.cancel(true); // attempt to interupt the thread
        throw new Exception();
    }