What is the 'realtime' process priority setting for?

Question

From what I\'ve read in the past, you\'re encouraged not to change the priority of your Windows applications programmatically, and if you do, you should never change them to

Answer 1

Simply, the "Real Time" priority class is higher than "High" priority class. I don't think there's much more to it than that. Oh yeah - you have to have the SeIncreaseBasePriorityPrivilege to put a thread into the Real Time class.

Windows will sometimes boost the priority of a thread for various reasons, but it won't boost the priority of a thread into another priority class. It also won't boost the priority of threads in the real-time priority class. So a High priority thread won't get any automatic temporary boost into the Real Time priority class.

Russinovich's "Inside Windows" chapter on how Windows handles priorities is a great resource for learning how this works:

• http://web.archive.org/web/20140909124652/http://download.microsoft.com/download/5/b/3/5b38800c-ba6e-4023-9078-6e9ce2383e65/C06X1116607.pdf

Note that there's absolutely no problem with a thread having a Real-time priority on a normal Windows system - they aren't necessarily for special processes running on dedicatd machines. I imagine that multimedia drivers and/or processes might need threads with a real-time priority. However, such a thread should not require much CPU - it should be blocking most of the time in order for normal system events to get processing.