Question

In my program, I need to run a external command in a Ubuntu environment (ntpdate) using java. Currently my code looks like this:

    Runtime rt = Runtime.getRuntime();

    byte[] readBuffer = new byte[131072];
    // Exec a process to do the query
    Process p = null;
    try {
        p = rt.exec("ntpdate -q " + ip);
    } catch (Exception ex) {
        ex.printStackTrace();
    }

    if(p!= null){
        try {
            Thread.sleep(1000);
        } catch (Exception e) {
        }

        // Read the input stream, copy it to the file
        InputStream in = p.getInputStream();


        try {
            int count = 0, rc;
            while ((rc = in.read(readBuffer, count, readBuffer.length - count)) != -1) {
                count += rc;
                if (count >= readBuffer.length) {
                    p.destroy();
                    break;
                }
            }
            p.destroy();
            result = processOutput(readBuffer, count);

        } catch (IOException ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();
        }
        p.destroy();

This code need to be ran simultaneously on multiple threads in order to maximize performance (I need to test a list of 1.000.000 addresses using ntpdate). However, it runs very slowly, barely consuming machine processing. What am I doing wrong? How could I make this more efficient?

The same problem arises when trying to execute “dig” using .exec(), so I doubt it is because of the specific program being called. Is there some restriction in using Runtime.exec() in a multi Threaded environment?

Answer 1

I think I found the solution, and that is that there is no solution using java’s Runtime.exec(). The problem seems to be that all calls to start a process are synchronized. Indeed, if you start each process alone (via synchronization) you get the exact same result of starting all processes together.

Are there any alternatives to exec? Otherwise, I will need to get some solution without linux’s ntpdate…