Best approach to allocate dedicated background thread in Spring Boot - spring-boot

Question

I need to create a dedicated thread listening on DatagramSocket.
Old school approach would be to create one during context creation:
#Bean
void beanDef() {
var thread = new Thread(myRunnable);
thread.setDaemon(true);
thread.start();
}
More modern approach would be to create an executor:
#Bean
Executor() {
var executor = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor();
executor.submit(myRunnable);
}
Which one should I prefer?

Answer 1

Something like this would be a modern way to launch a background thread in Spring:
#Component
public class MySocketListenerLauncher {
private ExecutorService executorService;
#PostConstruct
public void init() {
BasicThreadFactory factory = new BasicThreadFactory.Builder()
.namingPattern("socket-listener-%d").build();
executorService = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor(factory);
executorService.execute(new Runnable() {
#Override
public void run() {
// ... listen to socket ...
}
});
executorService.shutdown();
}
#PreDestroy
public void shutdown() {
if (executorService != null) {
executorService.shutdownNow();
}
}
}

Answer 2

Better use #Async annotation to create a thread in the background.
The #EnableAsync annotation switches on Spring's ability to run #Async methods in a background thread pool. This class also customizes the used Executor.
#Configuration
#EnableAsync
public class ThreadConfig {
#Bean(name = "specificTaskExecutor")
public TaskExecutor specificTaskExecutor() {
ThreadPoolTaskExecutor executor = new ThreadPoolTaskExecutor();
executor.initialize();
return executor;
}
}
and in below snippet
#Async("specificTaskExecutor")
public void runFromAnotherThreadPool() {
System.out.println("You function code here");
}
I hope this will help you.