[This is preliminary documentation and subject to change.]
Background tasks—tasks performed when an application's message loop is idle—provide a mechanism for handling low-priority tasks in a single-user environment. In the Windows®-based Terminal Server environment, however, one user's background task competes for CPU cycles with another user's foreground tasks. When multiple users are running both foreground and background tasks, the CPU demands are much higher than when all users are running only foreground tasks. To maximize CPU availability for all users, either disable background tasks when running in a Terminal Server environment or create efficient background tasks that are not resource-intensive.