Setting priority to Java's threads
You have a setPriority() method in the Thread class.
Check this javadoc.
Setting thread priority to maximum:
public static void main(String args[]) { Thread.currentThread().setPriority(Thread.MAX_PRIORITY); // Your main code.}
The series of articles here indicate some complexities in the management of thread priorities on various platforms.
I wonder if your fundamental problem is simply that your worker threads are very CPU intensive and hence rarely reach a point where they would naturally "let go" of the processor (for example by doing some IO or sleeping.) If such is the case then you might include some calls to yield() in those workers, hence giving other Threads more of a chance.
you can use the setPriority() method. For example:
new MyThread("Foo").start(); Thread bar = new MyThread("Bar"); bar.setPriority( Thread.NORM_PRIORITY + 1 ); bar.start();This gives bar the new priority which should quickly take over Foo
Edit:
To answer your comment, you can set the max priortiy using:
bar.setPriority( Thread.MAX_PRIORITY );