calling thread.sleep stalls main gui

[jc5]

Hi,

When I call thread.sleep in another thread, it seems to stall even the main event thread (the gui doesn't update itself for a long period of time). I was wondering if calling thread.sleep influences any of the other threads that may be running at the same time?

[mrmatt1111]

It could. If you call a Thread.sleep when handling a button click, for example, it will freeze that button's UI for as long as you sleep.

If you have a sleep within the run method of a thread then i can't see why it would effect other threads unless they are deadlock or competing for a shared resource that you have locked.

[Fubarable]

Agrees with MrMatt above. If however you want a more specific example then please post some sample code that demonstrates your problem.

Edit: also, if this is a Swing program, please have a look at this tutorial: Concurrency in Swing

Much luck and welcome to the forum.

[r035198x]

From your description that is the behavior you would get if you do call sleep on the EDT.
Either you are mistakingly calling sleep on the EDT or you are running some long task on the EDT.

[Jitu2000]

The thread that invokes the sleep command is the one that is put to sleep.

It does not matter on what thread u invoked the sleep method, always the calling thread goes to sleep.

Therefore, in your case the main thread itself is going to sleep.

[alchemist]

For all intensive purposes the main thread (you only have one) is in fact the thread the UI is operating on. Calling Thread.sleep will sleep the current thread, hence the UI locking up. If you need to have independent operations taking place then you need to run them on a different thread.

[r035198x]

For all intensive purposes the main thread (you only have one) is in fact the thread the UI is operating on. ...

The main thread and the EDT are different threads.

[alchemist]

Sorry my mistake :)
The event dispatch framework however can to someone new appear to be part of the main thread.