Trying to interrupt an RMI call

Question

We're trying to interrupt a call to a Weblogic RMI stub via
Thread.interrupt(). Doesn't seem to work. Can someone confirm that
this will never work, or might we be doing something wrong?
Why is this posted to the performance newsgroup? We're trying to build
a web service with a guaranteed response time. The servlet makes a
backend call via RMI. Before we make the RMI call, the servlet thread
requests another thread to interrupt it if the call takes too long. If
we can't interrupt the calling thread, there are only two options I can
think of. 1) Have the servlet thread pass the request to another thread
that can block. The servlet thread then waits on a queue for a
response, and can be interrupted. 2) Don't use weblogic RMI, and build
our own transport. Yuck.
Any ideas?
-Tim

Answer 1

Tim Harrison wrote:
Out of curiousity, do you guarantee end to end response time or just the
time that the request will be processed on your site.Hi Rob. End-to-end, of course! We're using a Reuters network that
bypasses the internet. :)
Ok, I'm just kidding. We'll just start with the guaranteed process
time.
That's what I thought :>
>
I'd be surprised if no one else has run into this issue with RMI. A
collegue of mine is building a test with Sun RMI to see if that is
interruptable. It seems that Weblogic might be catching the interrupt
exception below the stub level. When we interrupt a thread blocked in
an RMI call, the thread returns normally (after completing), and
Thread.isInterrupted() is false. I think that means that something in
the call is reseting the status. A quick glance at the generated stub
code does not seem to indicate anything, so I'm guessing it's at a lower
level.
Well, it depends on what we are doing when you attempt to interrupt our
thread. Most likely (since it's a stub waiting for a response from the server)
the RMI thread is blocked in a socket read system call. Depending on the
operating system and how javasoft implemented it, it may or may not be
interruptable.
-- Rob
Rob Woollen
Software Engineer
BEA WebLogic
[email protected]
>
-Tim