How to make another thread sleep in Java

Question

I have a class that extends Thread. This thread when running spends most of it\'s time sleeping, it will perform a check, if true perform a simple action, then sleep for 1/2

Answer 1

Actually, to tell the thread to sleep longer, I suggest that your special method would memorize this fact into a volatile field. Then, the thread of interest should read that variable, and sleep longer if set.

Now, to cause it to sleep immediately, you have to interrupt the thread. That will throw an exception, to stop the current processing. Now you have to deal with this ... Think if this is really what you want.

Another solution would be, in the thread normal's activity, to also poll the variable like in the first case, and to sleep if it is set. This would not cause an immediate sleep, but it could be pretty fast, and the interruption would be at special points in your code where you know you can stop without breaking things ...