Java, A Beginner's Guide, 5th Edition, 5th Edition

Thread Priorities

Each thread has associated with it a priority setting. A thread’s priority determines, in part, how much CPU time a thread receives relative to the other active threads. In general, low-priority threads receive little. High-priority threads receive a lot. As you might expect, how much CPU time a thread receives has profound impact on its execution characteristics and its interaction with other threads currently executing in the system.

It is important to understand that factors other than a thread’s priority also affect how much CPU time a thread receives. For example, if a high-priority thread is waiting on some resource, perhaps for keyboard input, then it will be blocked, and a lower priority thread will run. However, when ...