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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T20:07:30+00:00

My co-worker is using a third-party .NET library for which we don’t have the

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My co-worker is using a third-party .NET library for which we don’t have the source code. We’re using a ThreadPool to have a lot of threads call into this library, and occasionally one of the threads will just hang forever while the rest of them merrily chug along.

So we want to use the dreaded Thread.Abort to kill such threads. I’ve done this before when spinning up my own threads, but I’ve never used a ThreadPool. If we track the start times of each task like this:

static Dictionary<Thread, DateTime> started = new Dictionary<Thread, DateTime>();

static void DoSomeWork(object foo)
{
    lock(started)
        started[Thread.CurrentThread] = DateTime.Now;

    SomeBuggyLibraryThatMightInfiniteLoopOrSomething.callSomeFunction(doo);

    lock(started)
        started.Remove(Thread.CurrentThread);
}

then can we lock and iterate over the running threads and call Thread.Abort to kill them? And if we do, then will we need to add a new thread to the ThreadPool to replace the one that we just killed, or will the ThreadPool handle that for us?

EDIT: I’m very aware of all of the potential problems with Thread.Abort. I know that it should ideally never be used in production code, and that it doesn’t necessarily even stop the thread, and that if you abort a thread while the thread has acquired a lock, then you can hang up other threads, etc. But right now we’re on a tight deadline and we have decent reason to believe that in this one particular case, we can call Thread.Abort without putting the entire process in jeopardy, and we’d like to avoid rewriting this program to eliminate the ThreadPool unless we absolutely have to.

So what I want to know is this: given that we WILL be calling Thread.Abort on a thread that belongs to a ThreadPool, are there any special problems caused by these being ThreadPool threads, and do we have to manually spin up a new thread to replace the one that got killed or will the ThreadPool do that for us?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    No, you shouldn’t call Abort on threads in the thread pool. From my local testing, it seems that the ThreadPool does recreate threads if you abort them – I aborted 1000 thread pool threads and it was still working. I don’t know if you should rely on this behaviour, but maybe you can get away with it in this case. In general though using Thread.Abort is not the right way to do this.

    The correct way to call a function you don’t trust to behave well is to start it in a new process and kill the process if necessary.

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