C++ High Performance

Thread priorities

The priority of a thread affects how the thread is being scheduled. A thread with high priority is likely to be scheduled more often than threads with lower priorities. Thread priorities are important for lowering the latency of tasks.

Threads provided by the operating system usually have priorities. There is currently no way of setting the priority on a thread with the current C++ thread APIs. However, by using std::thread::native_handle, one can get a handle to the underlying operating system thread and use native APIs for setting priorities.

One phenomenon related to thread priorities that can hurt the performance and should be avoided is called priority inversion. It happens when a thread with high priority is waiting ...