Throw in a mutex and a condition variable. Many languages and systems (including C++) with locks allow you to set a timeout (either a specific time to wake or a

Throw in a mutex and a condition variable. Many languages and systems (including C++) with locks allow you to set a timeout (either a specific time to wake or a delay and then wake). Use a notify in the write thread to wake the reader. https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread/condition_variable https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/thread/condition_variable - C++11 so not available in this form to the blog writer, but an equivalent was. EDIT: I had C++ on the brain, the code is in Java and they're already using notifyAll. The wait should just be to the timeout limit and not shorter. If the data is ready in under a second, the notifyAll will wake the thread and it can keep running and there's no risk of waiting an extra second (approx) past the actual deadline as the current code would do.