Question about terminating a thread cleanly in .NE

Question

I understand Thread.Abort() is evil from the multitude of articles I've read on the topic, so I'm currently in the process of ripping out to of my abort's in order to replace it for a cleaner way; and after comparing user strategies from people here on stackoverflow and then after reading "How to: Create and Terminate Threads (C# Programming Guide)" from MSDN both which state an approach very much the same -- which is to use a volatile bool approach checking strategy, which is nice, but I still have a few questions....

Immediately what stands out to me here, is what if you do not have a simple worker process which is just running a loop of crunching code? For instance for me, my process is a background file uploader process, I do in fact loop through each file, so that's something, and sure I could add my while (!_shouldStop) at the top which covers me every loop iteration, but I have many more business processes which occur before it hits it's next loop iteration, I want this cancel procedure to be snappy; don't tell me I need to sprinkle these while loops every 4-5 lines down throughout my entire worker function?!

I really hope there is a better way, could somebody please advise me on if this is in fact, the correct [and only?] approach to do this, or strategies they have used in the past to achieve what I am after.

Thanks gang.

Further reading: All these SO responses assume the worker thread will loop. That doesn't sit comfortably with me. What if it is a linear, but timely background operation?

Answer 1

Well, unfortunately in multithreading you often have to compromise "snappiness" for cleanliness... you can exit a thread immediately if you Interrupt it, but it won't be very clean. So no, you don't have to sprinkle the _shouldStop checks every 4-5 lines, but if you do interrupt your thread then you should handle the exception and exit out of the loop in a clean manner.

Update

Even if it's not a looping thread (i.e. perhaps it's a thread that performs some long-running asynchronous operation or some type of block for input operation), you can Interrupt it, but you should still catch the ThreadInterruptedException and exit the thread cleanly. I think that the examples you've been reading are very appropriate.

Update 2.0

Yes I have an example... I'll just show you an example based on the link you referenced:

public class InterruptExample
{
    private Thread t;
    private volatile boolean alive;

    public InterruptExample()
    {
        alive = false;

        t = new Thread(()=>
        {
            try
            {
                while (alive)
                {
                    /* Do work. */
                }
            }
            catch (ThreadInterruptedException exception)
            {
                /* Clean up. */
            }
        });
        t.IsBackground = true;
    }

    public void Start()
    {
        alive = true;
        t.Start();
    }


    public void Kill(int timeout = 0)
    {
        // somebody tells you to stop the thread
        t.Interrupt();

        // Optionally you can block the caller
        // by making them wait until the thread exits.
        // If they leave the default timeout, 
        // then they will not wait at all
        t.Join(timeout);
    }
}

Answer 2

If cancellation is a requirement of the thing you're building, then it should be treated with as much respect as the rest of your code--it may be something you have to design for.

Lets assume that your thread is doing one of two things at all times.

1. Something CPU bound
2. Waiting for the kernel

If you're CPU bound in the thread in question, you probably have a good spot to insert the bail-out check. If you're calling into someone else's code to do some long-running CPU-bound task, then you might need to fix the external code, move it out of process (aborting threads is evil, but aborting processes is well-defined and safe), etc.

If you're waiting for the kernel, then there's probably a handle (or fd, or mach port, ...) involved in the wait. Usually if you destroy the relevant handle, the kernel will return with some failure code immediately. If you're in .net/java/etc. you'll likely end up with an exception. In C, whatever code you already have in place to handle system call failures will propagate the error up to a meaningful part of your app. Either way, you break out of the low-level place fairly cleanly and in a very timely manner without needing new code sprinkled everywhere.

A tactic I often use with this kind of code is to keep track of a list of handles that need to be closed and then have my abort function set a "cancelled" flag and then close them. When the function fails it can check the flag and report failure due to cancellation rather than due to whatever the specific exception/errno was.

You seem to be implying that an acceptable granularity for cancellation is at the level of a service call. This is probably not good thinking--you are much better off cancelling the background work synchronously and joining the old background thread from the foreground thread. It's way cleaner becasue:

1. It avoids a class of race conditions when old bgwork threads come back to life after unexpected delays.

2. It avoids potential hidden thread/memory leaks caused by hanging background processes by making it possible for the effects of a hanging background thread to hide.

There are two reasons to be scared of this approach:

1. You don't think you can abort your own code in a timely fashion. If cancellation is a requirement of your app, the decision you really need to make is a resource/business decision: do a hack, or fix your problem cleanly.

2. You don't trust some code you're calling because it's out of your control. If you really don't trust it, consider moving it out-of-process. You get much better isolation from many kinds of risks, including this one, that way.