The application’s priority – and more in general the thread’s priority – indicates how the application is “important” for the CPU. The more the priority is hight the more the CPU will dedicate his time to execute it.

In .NET the priority of a thread is indicated to the Thread.Priority property. By default his value is Normal, but some applications might need to increase or decrease it. If your application is single threaded, you can use the following routine to change its priority:

Sub SetApplicationPriority(ByVal priority As System.Threading.ThreadPriority)    ' Change the priority of the current thread    Thread.CurrentThread.Priority = priorityEnd Sub

If your application is multithreaded, the procedure will affect only the actual thread from which the procedure is called. The values that you can pass to the procedure are (from highest to lowest priority): Highest, AboveNormal, Normal, BelowNormal, Lowest.

Notice that you should use the Highest priority only for truly critical tasks, as processes with this priority tend to drain CPU resources and leave no time for lower priority jobs.