Threads and Concurrent Programming

Thread Priority

The setPriority(int) method lets you set a thread’s priority to an integer value between Thread.MIN PRIORITY and Thread.MAX PRIORITY, the bounds defined as constants in the Thread class. Using setPriority() gives you some control over a thread’s execution. In general, higher-priority threads get to run before, and longer than, lowerpriority threads.

To see how setPriority() works, suppose we change NumberThread’s constructor to the following:

In this case, each thread sets its priority to its ID number. So, thread five will have priority five, a higher priority than all the other threads. Suppose we now run 2 million iterations of each of these threads. Because 2 million iterations will take a long time if we print the thread’s ID on each iteration, let’s modify the run() method, so that the ID is printed every 1 million iterations:

Given this modification, we get the following output when we run Numbers:

It appears from this output that the threads ran to completion in priority order. Thus, thread five completed 2 million iterations before thread four started to run, and so on. This shows that, on my system at least, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) supports priority scheduling.