Daemon vs Non Daemon thread in Java

 A Thread can be made a daemon, which makes it run in the background. The latter also affects VM termination behavior: the VM does not terminate automatically as long as there are non-daemon threads running.

A daemon Thread only runs as long as there are non-daemon Threads running. When the last non-daemon Thread ends, the whole program ends no matter if it had daemon Threads still running or not; i.e. A running daemon thread can be terminated by the VM, however a running non-daemon thread can not be terminated by the VM.

An example:

Imagine a Java application. It starts off with just one thread, the "main" thread which runs the main method. This is a regular (non-daemon) thread. Now imagine again that the program starts another thread which sits in a loop doing something. If the new thread is a regular (non-daemon) thread, it will prevent the program from finishing when "main" ends, and keep going forever!

Now, this isn't always what is required. Sometimes you want to end this "background" processing when the program finishes. To do this, you can mark threads as daemon threads. Daemon threads don't prevent the program from ending, but stop when the main thread, stops:

1. Thread hello = new HelloThread();  
2. hello.setDaemon(true);  

A classic example of a daemon thread is the garbage collector thread found in many Java Virtual Machines. It needs to run continuously while any other threads are running, but should not prevent the program from exiting. When the program exits, there is no more need for a garbage collector.

http://www.coderanch.com/t/230947/threads/java/Daemon-threads-non-daemon-Threads