lowering priority of Task.Factory.StartNew thread

As others have mentioned, you need to specify a custom scheduler to go with your task. Unfortunately there isn’t a suitable built-in scheduler.

You could go for the ParallelExtensionsExtras that Glenn linked to, but if you want something simple that can just be pasted right into your code, try the following. Use like this:

Task.Factory.StartNew(() => {
    // everything here will be executed in a thread whose priority is BelowNormal
}, null, TaskCreationOptions.None, PriorityScheduler.BelowNormal);

The code:

public class PriorityScheduler : TaskScheduler
{
    public static PriorityScheduler AboveNormal = new PriorityScheduler(ThreadPriority.AboveNormal);
    public static PriorityScheduler BelowNormal = new PriorityScheduler(ThreadPriority.BelowNormal);
    public static PriorityScheduler Lowest = new PriorityScheduler(ThreadPriority.Lowest);

    private BlockingCollection<Task> _tasks = new BlockingCollection<Task>();
    private Thread[] _threads;
    private ThreadPriority _priority;
    private readonly int _maximumConcurrencyLevel = Math.Max(1, Environment.ProcessorCount);

    public PriorityScheduler(ThreadPriority priority)
    {
        _priority = priority;
    }

    public override int MaximumConcurrencyLevel
    {
        get { return _maximumConcurrencyLevel; }
    }

    protected override IEnumerable<Task> GetScheduledTasks()
    {
        return _tasks;
    }

    protected override void QueueTask(Task task)
    {
        _tasks.Add(task);

        if (_threads == null)
        {
            _threads = new Thread[_maximumConcurrencyLevel];
            for (int i = 0; i < _threads.Length; i++)
            {
                int local = i;
                _threads[i] = new Thread(() =>
                {
                    foreach (Task t in _tasks.GetConsumingEnumerable())
                        base.TryExecuteTask(t);
                });
                _threads[i].Name = $"PriorityScheduler: {i}";
                _threads[i].Priority = _priority;
                _threads[i].IsBackground = true;
                _threads[i].Start();
            }
        }
    }

    protected override bool TryExecuteTaskInline(Task task, bool taskWasPreviouslyQueued)
    {
        return false; // we might not want to execute task that should schedule as high or low priority inline
    }
}

Notes:

• the worker threads are all background threads, so important tasks should not be scheduled using this scheduler; only those which can be discarded if the process shuts down
• adapted from an implementation by Bnaya Eshet
• I don’t fully understand every override; just going with Bnaya’s choices for MaximumConcurrencyLevel, GetScheduledTasks and TryExecuteTaskInline.