Do Operation Queues help out when Core Animation strikes to animate?

Question

Core Animation uses Background Threads. When performing heavy calculations on the main thread, CA stops animating due to its low priority threads. How could Operation Queues help out in such an situation?

Answer 1

NSOperationQueue doesn't seem to have any way of specifying a thread priority, and while in general NSOperationQueue appears to have a knowledge of what's going on in the system and take it into account, it is not documented that it will respect CA threads.

If you need to run background calculations all the time your best bet is to start your own thread and empirically set a priority lower than CA, however this too is not documented and might change across system versions.

Another option might be to wrap CA animations with calls to your own code to suspend background calculation.