Say you have an application where a user is typing some text and as she types you'd want to perform some expensive computations in the background (related to the text that is being typed). Although you would like to do lots of things, your main priority is that the system responsiveness stay at acceptable levels so the user doesn't notice such a heavy load. Is there a way (ideally platform/language independent) to control what algorithms should be executed in the background based on the system load and responsiveness?