Re: mutithreading in webapps

From:

"Mike Schilling" <mscottschilling@hotmail.com>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Sun, 5 Aug 2007 18:54:03 -0700

Message-ID:

<Wdvti.1701$rG7.324@nlpi061.nbdc.sbc.com>

ameyas7 wrote:

It is legal according to the spec to start multiple threads, so
you could:
   - web request comes in
   - you start N threads
   - you wait to all threads are done
   - web response go back out

But if it takes a long time, the the browser will consider
it a timeout.

So it is not a problem whether multi threading will work in Tomcat -
it is a question whether it is a good way of solving the problem.

Arne

well my web request will not be waiting till the job is done.
it is actually a notification service, ppl will keep posting it and
then it will pick up all queued requests and notify the recepients
(say by mail or other means)
so the web response is not blocked on the completion of the worker
thread.

This can be made to work inside Tomca, but there are subtle isses.

1. You need to make your background threads daemon threads, or normal Tomcat
shutdown won't work, because even after all messages are done processing,
your threads will still be active.
2. If your application is stopped using Tomcat's mangement interface, your
background threads should stop too. You need to hook the Servelet.destroy()
method to accomplish this.