ScheduledExecutorService seems to have the problem that if it can’t get a free thread the periodic task will happen with delay. Unfortunately for me, the periodic task it’s assigned to really does need to happen fairly on schedule. At present it’s scheduled for once per minute but sometimes due to the application being busy with other things (I assume this is why) it fails to make it within five minutes, and five minutes happens to be the “major production bugs” threshold.
How to force this via prioritizing or otherwise controlling the thread balancer?
If your ScheduledExecutorService is used for other tasks or if your task sometimes takes more than 1 minute to run, you can simply increase the number of threads available in your ScheduledExecutorService. So if one task has not finished running, the executor will still be able to run a new one.
(I picked 10 randomly – if you run your task every minute and it can run for up to 5 minutes, that leaves you some margin for error)