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goticker

Ticker Stop behaviour in Golang

If I am ranging over a ticker channel and call stop() the channel is stopped but not closed.

In this Example:

package main

import (
    "time"
    "log"
)

func main() {
    ticker := time.NewTicker(1 * time.Second)
    go func(){
        for _ = range ticker.C {
            log.Println("tick")
        }
        log.Println("stopped")
    }()
    time.Sleep(3 * time.Second)
    log.Println("stopping ticker")
    ticker.Stop()
    time.Sleep(3 * time.Second)
}

Running produces:

2013/07/22 14:26:53 tick
2013/07/22 14:26:54 tick
2013/07/22 14:26:55 tick
2013/07/22 14:26:55 stopping ticker

So that goroutine never exits. Is there a better way to handle this case? Should I care that the goroutine never exited?

Solution

  • Signal "done" on a second channel and select in your goroutine between ticker and done channel.

    Depending on what you really want to do a better solution might exist, but this is hard to tell from the reduced demo code.