Delayed tasks execute no sooner than they are enabled, but without any real-time guarantees about when, after they are enabled, they will commence. Tasks scheduled for exactly the same execution time are enabled in first-in-first-out (FIFO) order of submission.

While this class inherits from ThreadPoolExecutor, a few of the inherited tuning methods are not useful for it. In particular, because it acts as a fixed-sized pool using corePoolSize threads and an unbounded queue, adjustments to maximumPoolSize have no useful effect.

Extension notes: This class overrides AbstractExecutorService submit methods to generate internal objects to control per-task delays and scheduling. To preserve functionality, any further overrides of these methods in subclasses must invoke superclass versions, which effectively disables additional task customization. However, this class provides alternative protected extension method decorateTask (one version each for Runnable and Callable) that can be used to customize the concrete task types used to execute commands entered via execute, submit, schedule, scheduleAtFixedRate, and scheduleWithFixedDelay. By default, a ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor uses a task type extending FutureTask. However, this may be modified or replaced using subclasses of the form:

 public class CustomScheduledExecutor extends ScheduledThreadPoolExecutor {

   static class CustomTask<V> implements RunnableScheduledFuture<V> { ... }

   protected <V> RunnableScheduledFuture<V> decorateTask(
                Runnable r, RunnableScheduledFuture<V> task) {
       return new CustomTask<V>(r, task);
   }

   protected <V> RunnableScheduledFuture<V> decorateTask(
                Callable<V> c, RunnableScheduledFuture<V> task) {
       return new CustomTask<V>(c, task);
   }
   // ... add constructors, etc.
 }