Question

If the method call takes more than 10 seconds I want to kill it and move on.

Is multi-threading my only option to solve this problem?

If I go with multi-threading which I’m very new at, my run method would only contain the one method as follows. If myMethod() gets stuck in an infinite loop is there a way to interrupt this thread?

public void run() {
    myMethod();
}

Let’s assume myMethod() is the following and changing it is not an option.

while(true){
    System.out.println("Thinking.");
        for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++) {
            //wasting time
        }
}

I was going for Mik378’s solution, but I don’t think this will work as myMethod doesn’t throw the InterruptedException exception.

Answer 1

Using threads to achieve this is tricky. There is no portable and safe method to kill a thread without cooperation from said thread. For further details, see How do you kill a thread in Java? and Why are Thread.stop [et al] deprecated?

A more robust approach is to call the method in the context of a separate process, and kill that process.

An even better approach is to understand why things are getting stuck in the first place, and figure out a way to prevent them from getting stuck (or a way to have a timeout and throw an exception etc). Whether that’s a realistic possibility in your case, I don’t know.