multithreading - android thread management onPause

Question

I have a class that extends the Thread class and has its run method implemented as so.

public void run(){
    while(!terminate){
        if(paused){
            Thread.yield();
        }else{
            accummulator++;
        }
    }
}

This thread is spawned from the onCreate method.

When my UI is hidden (when the Home key is pressed) my onPause method will set the paused flag to true and yield the tread. However in the DDMS I still see the uTime of the thread accumulate and its state as "running".

So my question is. What is the proper way to stop the thread so that it does not use up CPU time?

Answer 1

It is actually bad practice to keep a thread running after onPause. The reason is that after onPause your application may drop out of memory at any time without your being able to know, therefore you will not be able to clean up after yourself.

The proper way to do it is stopping the thread onPause and recreating it onResume. If you need state you can use Android's built in saveState methods or settings or whichever to keep that.