Member-only story

How to Cancel a Scheduled Task in Java? — IT Interview Guide

Aditya Bhuyan
4 min readJan 31, 2025

--

Photo by Ivan Shilov on Unsplash

In Java, there are multiple ways to schedule tasks to run at specific times or after certain delays, using classes such as , TimerTask, and ScheduledExecutorService. However, sometimes you may need to cancel a scheduled task, either because it’s no longer needed, an error occurred, or a change in the application’s logic requires stopping the task.

In this guide, we will explore how to cancel scheduled tasks in Java. The ability to cancel a scheduled task efficiently and correctly is essential for proper resource management, ensuring your application behaves as expected and doesn’t consume unnecessary resources. We will cover the use of Timer, TimerTask, and ScheduledExecutorService to handle scheduled tasks and demonstrate how to cancel them.

Understanding Scheduled Tasks

A scheduled task in Java typically involves running a task at fixed intervals or after a certain delay. Java provides the Timer and ScheduledExecutorService APIs to schedule tasks in a background thread, with Timer being more suitable for simple scheduling and ScheduledExecutorService being preferred for handling more complex scheduling scenarios.

Using Timer and TimerTask

--

--

Aditya Bhuyan
Aditya Bhuyan

Written by Aditya Bhuyan

I am Aditya. I work as a cloud native specialist and consultant. In addition to being an architect and SRE specialist, I work as a cloud engineer and developer.

No responses yet