How to kill a BufferedInputStream .read() call

Question

I\'m working on writing a program to download very large files (~2GB) from a server. I\'ve written the program to be able to resume partially finished downloads,

In

Answer 1

See http://thushw.blogspot.com/2010/10/java-urlconnection-provides-no-fail.html for code to handle this situation

Edited: actually, setting a Socket timeout (in milliseconds) using setSoTimeout (as suggested in the link comment from Joop Eggen) is probably better.

Answer 2

Have you .setReadTimeout(int timeout) on your URLConnection?

-- EDIT

See answer from @DNA for a neat solution:

in short words you can spawn a parallel thread that .disconnect()s the URLConnection (after letting your second thread sleep for timeout milliseconds), thus triggering an IOException that'll get you out of the stalled read.

Answer 3

The only reliable way I found is to instantiate Socket as an InterruptibleChannel, and do an interrupt on a stuck IO thread. (BTW, you don't have to use asynchronous NIO calls with InterruptibleChannels, blocking I/O works fine, you just have a really nice and uniform way of kicking the stuck exchanges)

Though, it looks like URLConnection does not allow you to hook up a custom Socket factory.

Maybe you should investigate HttpClient from Apache.

EDIT

Here is how you create Interruptible Socket.

import java.net.InetSocketAddress;
import java.net.Socket;
import java.net.SocketAddress;
import java.nio.channels.SocketChannel;

final SocketAddress remoteAddr =
    new InetSocketAddress(
        serverAddress,
        servicePort
    );

final SocketChannel socketChannel = SocketChannel.open( );

socketChannel.connect( remoteAddr );

// Here java.io.Socket is obtained
Socket socket = socketChannel.socket( );

I don't have HttpClient sample, but I know that you can customize socket initialization.