Task priority and background properties...

Question

Is it possible to set a task priority, as we can with System.Threading.Threads?
What about the background concept of a thread (IsBackground property)?

Answer 1

Yesterday I talked to a collegue that has a specific use for task priorities.
He has a service that perform tasks that come in at a fairly high rate. He lets the ThreadPool to manage when things get executed. This worked fine in the beginning.
Then users started complaining that the system was too slow. The problem is that user submitted work is added to the ThreadPool along with "system" tasks. He needed a way to indicate the user submitted work takes priority over all other tasks.
His solution was to fix the max thread count of the pool to 1 less than the number of processors and to process user tasks on a seperate thread. His thinking is that user tasks are guaranteed to have a waiting processor to do the work.
Although this solved the problem most of the time it did create two new problems: 1. all other tasks have fewer threads to do thier work...so they are slower. 2. user submitted tasks are essentially convoyed to a single thread. they block each other.
I think his solution is a bit wacky. The question is: can Parallel Extentions deal with this better?