Thrift Server Issue - Main Thread

//Pseudo-code

//Main thread:
class daemon //Meant to be a singleton - mostly for signal-handling reasons
{
public:
  daemon()
    : _signal_received(false),
      _thrift_server_thread(_shared_state),
      _background_thread(_shared_state) {}

  void main_loop()
  {
    while(!_signal_received)
      {
        //Any suggestions on how to address signal-handling
        //without having a spinning thread?
      }

    //Stop server(thread)

    //Previously I was directly invoking _server->stop() here
    //on a TSimpleServer from the main thread. This was causing the
    //error as noted in the SO question(http://goo.gl/3yBhV).
    //I resolved this by adding an endpoint to the Thrift service
    //primarily to stop the server in response to an invocation.
    //This seems far from ideal, but I couldn't find a better solution.
    //Any suggestions?
    stop_server_thread();

    //Stop background thread
    stop_background_thread();
  }

  static void signal_handler(int signal)
  {
    _signal_received = true;
  }

private:
  static bool _signal_received;

  void stop_server_thread()
  {
    thrift_client_request_to_stop_server()

    _server_thread.join();
  }

  void stop_background_thread()
  {
    _background_thread.interrupt();

    _background_thread.join();
  }

  void thrift_client_request_to_stop_server()
  {
    boost::shared_ptr<TSocket> socket(new TSocket("localhost", 9090));
    boost::shared_ptr<TTransport> transport(new TBufferedTransport(socket));
    boost::shared_ptr<TProtocol> protocol(new TBinaryProtocol(transport));

    thrift_client client(protocol);
    transport->open();
    client.stop_server();
    transport->close();
  }
};