Question

I know that Thread.sleep(1000); can be used to freeze the current thread (for 1 second in the example), but since you need to throw an Exception I am wondering if it is safe to use it. I don’t want to use it in a program and accidentally cause problems.

Is it “ok” to use Thread.sleep(); or is there a better way to achieve the same outcome?

Answer 1

since you need to throw an Exception I am wondering if it is safe to use it.

Thread#sleep only throws 2 exceptions:

• IllegalArgumentException if the parameter is negative
• InterruptedException if the thread gets interrupted

=> if you pass a positive number and the thread doesn’t get interrupted there will be no exception.

Unless you call theThread.interrupt() from another thread you will be fine.

EDIT

It seems you want to create a timer – in that case you would make your life much simpler by using the built-in mechanisms:

Runnable r = new Runnable() {
    public void run() { runYourTaskHere(); }
};
ScheduledExecutorService scheduler = Executors.newScheduledThreadPool(1);
scheduler.scheduleAtFixedRate(r, 0, 1, TimeUnit.SECONDS);