Java ExecutorService: awaitTermination of all recursively created tasks

Question

I use an ExecutorService to execute a task. This task can recursively create other tasks which are submitted to the same ExecutorService and those

Answer 1

Wow, you guys are quick:)

Thank you for all the suggestions. Futures don't easily integrate with my model because I don't know how many runnables are scheduled beforehand. So if I keep a parent task alive just to wait for it's recursive child tasks to finish I have a lot of garbage laying around.

I solved my problem using the AtomicInteger suggestion. Essentially, I subclassed ThreadPoolExecutor and increment the counter on calls to execute() and decrement on calls to afterExecute(). When the counter gets 0 I call shutdown(). This seems to work for my problems, not sure if that's a generally good way to do that. Especially, I assume that you only use execute() to add Runnables.

As a side node: I first tried to check in afterExecute() the number of Runnables in the queue and the number of workers that are active and shutdown when those are 0; but that didn't work because not all Runnables showed up in the queue and the getActiveCount() didn't do what I expected either.

Anyhow, here's my solution: (if anybody finds serious problems with this, please let me know:)

public class MyThreadPoolExecutor extends ThreadPoolExecutor {

    private final AtomicInteger executing = new AtomicInteger(0);

    public MyThreadPoolExecutor(int coorPoolSize, int maxPoolSize, long keepAliveTime,
        TimeUnit seconds, BlockingQueue queue) {
        super(coorPoolSize, maxPoolSize, keepAliveTime, seconds, queue);
    }


    @Override
    public void execute(Runnable command) {
        //intercepting beforeExecute is too late!
        //execute() is called in the parent thread before it terminates
        executing.incrementAndGet();
        super.execute(command);
    }


    @Override
    protected void afterExecute(Runnable r, Throwable t) {
        super.afterExecute(r, t);
        int count = executing.decrementAndGet();
        if(count == 0) {
            this.shutdown();
        }
    }

}