How can I make external methods interruptable?

Question

The Problem

I\'m running multiple invocations of some external method via an ExecutorService. I would like to be able to interrupt these methods, but unfortunately the

Answer 1

The following weird ideas come to my mind:

• Using a byte code modification library, such as Javassist, to introduce the interrupt-checks at various points within the bytecode. Just at the beginning of methods may not be enough, since you mention that these external methods are not recursive, so you may want to forcefully stop them at any point. Doing this at the byte code level would also make it very responsive, e.g. even if the external code is running within a loop or something, it would be possible to introduce the interrupt checks. However, this will add some overhead, so overall performance will be slower.
• Launching separate processes (e.g. separate VMs) for the external code. Aborting processes may be much easier to code than the other solutions. The disadvantage is that you would need some sort of communication channel between the external code and your code, e.g. IPC, sockets etc. The second disadvantage is that you need much more resources (CPU, memory) to start up new VMs and it may be environment specific. This would work if you start a couple of tasks using the external code, but not hundreds of tasks. Also, the performance would suffer, but the computation itself would be as fast as the original. Processes can be forcefully stopped by using java.lang.Process.destroy()
• Using a custom SecurityManager, which performs the interrupt check on each of the checkXXX methods. If the external code somehow calls privileged methods, it may be sufficient for you to abort at these locations. An example would be java.lang.SecurityManager.checkPropertyAccess(String) if the external code periodically reads a system property.