Stop all threads

Getting Started
1

I have an app that does calculations for up to 100,000 database records. loops through the database creating a thread for each calculation.
I want the user to be able to stop all threads with a Cancel button so here’s my process -
User clicks Cancel changing a global boolean killProcess to True
I tried putting this in the loop -

Do until rs EOF
if killProcess then 
exit sub
else
[create thread]

but the running processes never allows the button code to change the boolean killProcess. It is always false.

Then I tried this at the beginning of the thread code -

If not killProcess then
[do calculation]
end if

It works but doesn’t stop the loop from creating new threads so a long delay before stopping.

2

Is your loop creating the threads on a thread as well?
If not try putting it on one.

3

You’ll need both. One in the thread code to check to see if threads have been requested to stop (unless the calculation is very short–see below), and also one to stop new thread creation.
The new thread creation loop is probably running on the main thread – same as the UI – so it’s blocking the button press. Put it in a thread of its own to keep the UI responsive.
Note that, if the calculations in the threads are long-running, you’ll want to put the stop check inside the calculation loop, or if there’s not a loop, between steps, if possible. Otherwise, these will continue to run until complete. Putting it at the beginning will have little effect. Your other option here is to keep an array of the threads, and when you stop processing, walk through it calling the Stop() method. I have had some issues with this on Windows, though.
However, if your individual calculations are short, you may want to consider not launching separate threads. Rather, put the whole process in a single thread. You may be incurring more overhead in thread management than time savings. Note that threads aren’t multicore, so running threads is always slower than just executing the processing on the main thread. Threads keep your UI responsive, but you aren’t gaining any performance by breaking the computation into multiple threads as describe; you’ll get the responsive UI with a single thread for the whole job with minimal overhead. If you are looking to distribute the job to multiple cores, you’ll want to use Workers.