When does Java’s Thread.sleep throw InterruptedException?

You should generally NOT ignore the exception. Take a look at the following paper:

Don’t swallow interrupts

Sometimes throwing InterruptedException is
not an option, such as when a task defined by Runnable calls an
interruptible method. In this case, you can’t rethrow
InterruptedException, but you also do not want to do nothing. When a
blocking method detects interruption and throws InterruptedException,
it clears the interrupted status. If you catch InterruptedException
but cannot rethrow it, you should preserve evidence that the
interruption occurred so that code higher up on the call stack can
learn of the interruption and respond to it if it wants to. This task
is accomplished by calling interrupt() to “reinterrupt” the current
thread, as shown in Listing 3. At the very least, whenever you catch
InterruptedException and don’t rethrow it, reinterrupt the current
thread before returning.

public class TaskRunner implements Runnable {
    private BlockingQueue<Task> queue;
 
    public TaskRunner(BlockingQueue<Task> queue) { 
        this.queue = queue; 
    }
 
    public void run() { 
        try {
             while (true) {
                 Task task = queue.take(10, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
                 task.execute();
             }
         }
         catch (InterruptedException e) { 
             // Restore the interrupted status
             Thread.currentThread().interrupt();
         }
    }
}

• From Don’t swallow interrupts

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See the entire paper here:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-jtp05236/index.html?ca=drs-