android - AsyncTask threads never die

Question

I'm using AsyncTasks to fetch data in response to the user pressing a button. This works well and keeps the interface responsive while fetching the data, but when I checked out what was going on in the Eclipse debugger, I found out that every time a new AsyncTask was created (which is quite often, because they can only be used once), a new thread was being created but never terminated.

The result is a large number of AsyncTask threads just sitting there. I'm not sure if this is a problem in practice or not, but I'd really like to get rid of those extra threads.

How can I kill these threads?

Answer 1

AsyncTask manages a thread pool, created with ThreadPoolExecutor. It will have from 5 to 128 threads. If there are more than 5 threads, those extra threads will stick around for at most 10 seconds before being removed. (note: these figures are for the presently-visible open source code and vary by Android release).

Leave the AsyncTask threads alone, please.