Thread Priority
A thread’s Priority property determines how much execution time it gets relative to other active threads in the operating system, on the following scale:
enum ThreadPriority { Lowest, BelowNormal, Normal, AboveNormal, Highest }
The following code example shows the result of changing the priority of a thread. Two threads are created and the priority of one thread is set to BelowNormal. Both threads increment a variable in a while loop and run for a set time.
Example
using System;
using System.Threading;
namespace ConsoleApplication1
{
class Program
{
static void Main()
{
PriorityTest priorityTest = new PriorityTest();
ThreadStart startDelegate =
new ThreadStart(priorityTest.ThreadMethod);
Thread threadOne = new Thread(startDelegate);
threadOne.Name = "ThreadOne";
Thread threadTwo = new Thread(startDelegate);
threadTwo.Name = "ThreadTwo";
threadTwo.Priority = ThreadPriority.BelowNormal;
threadOne.Start();
threadTwo.Start();
// Allow counting for 10 seconds.
Thread.Sleep(10000);
priorityTest.LoopSwitch = false;
}
}
class PriorityTest
{
bool loopSwitch;
public PriorityTest()
{
loopSwitch = true;
}
public bool LoopSwitch
{
set { loopSwitch = value; }
}
public void ThreadMethod()
{
long threadCount = 0;
while (loopSwitch)
{
threadCount++;
}
Console.WriteLine("{0} with {1,11} priority " +
"has a count = {2,13}", Thread.CurrentThread.Name,
Thread.CurrentThread.Priority.ToString(),
threadCount.ToString("N0"));
}
}
}
