lowerpriority

Lower priority is a designation used in resource management and scheduling to indicate that a task, process, data stream, or request should be considered after higher-priority items have been addressed. It reflects a relative ordering where some work is allowed to proceed only when more important work has been satisfied, or when system resources are idle.

In operating systems, schedulers assign priorities to tasks, and lower-priority tasks may be preempted or run only when higher-priority tasks are not runnable. The exact behavior varies by system: some use fixed priority classes, while others use dynamic or niceness-based schemes. For example, in many Unix-like systems, increasing the niceness value lowers a task’s priority, meaning it will receive CPU time after more urgent tasks.

In networks and quality of service, lower-priority traffic is typically deprioritized during congestion. Higher-priority classes may be buffered or transmitted first, while lower-priority classes experience increased delays or possible packet loss under heavy load. The concept also applies to batch processing and job scheduling, where lower-priority jobs are queued behind higher-priority ones and may be throttled to protect interactive or time-sensitive workloads.

Design considerations include preventing starvation of lower-priority tasks. Techniques such as aging gradually raise the priority of waiting tasks to ensure eventual execution. The term is relative and implementation-specific, so the exact rules for what constitutes “lower priority” and how it interacts with fairness and responsiveness can vary across systems and applications. Related concepts include priority scheduling, niceness, and quality of service.