Thread consuming queue, Terminate

Question

I would like to know if the following method is correct or not. I've producer and consumer thread that work on a common BlockingQueue. The producer is a sniffer thread so it will stop automatically,but fot the consumer i think to terminate with a loop on status (alive/dead) of producer thread. Any suggestions? Thanks

-)From the Main thread:

    ArrayBlockingQueue<PcapPacket> queue = new ArrayBlockingQueue<>(); 
    Producer p = new Producer(queue);
    Thread t1 =new Thread(p);
    t1.start();
    Consumer c = new Consumer(queue,t1);
    new Thread(c).start();

-)Producer

public void run() {
         public void nextPacket(PcapPacket packet, String user) {
            try {
                queue.put(packet); 
            } catch (InterruptedException ex) {

            }

-) Consumer

public void run() {
   while(producer.isAlive()){
        try {
        //Thread.sleep(50);
        packet=queue.take(); 

Answer 1

Polling producer's status is sub-optimal.

Preferred approach is to make producer, during producer exit, put some 'poison pill' into queue, and for consumer to end it's loop as soon as it have received that pill:

class Producer implements  Runnable {

    static final Object TIME_TO_STOP = new Object();

    private final BlockingQueue<Object> q;

    Producer(BlockingQueue<Object> q) {
        this.q = q;
    }


    @Override
    public void run() {
        try {
            while (true) {
                q.put(readNextPacket());
            }
        } finally {
            // exception happened
            try {
                q.put(TIME_TO_STOP);
            } catch (InterruptedException e) {
                // somehow log failure to stop properly
            }
        }
    }
}

class Consumer implements Runnable {

    private final BlockingQueue<Object> q;

    Consumer(BlockingQueue<Object> q) {
        this.q = q;
    }

    @Override
    public void run() {
        while (true) {
            Object packet = q.take();
            if (packet == Producer.TIME_TO_STOP) {
                break;
            }
            // process packet
        }
    }
}