Ability to throttle background processes?

[2twisty]

Since the Pi is limited in processing power, it would be helpful if certain background processes could be assigned a lower priority, such as library scanning.

I have thousands of TV episodes and several hundred movies in my collection, and while the Pi is scanning the disks to include them in the library, the CPU is at 70-90% utilization.

Some of this excess overhead is because I'm using NTFS for the drives. I'm going to convert to ext4, but even then, it would be nice to be able to tell the Pi that library scanning takes a back seat to playback.

Unfortunately, since XBMC is monolithic, I can't use available linux tools to control process priority. This is something that would have to be implemented in the code.

Is this something that should be requested of the XBMC devs? In that world, Pi and Android users are the minority, and most users have plenty of processing power to fly through a library update. I fear that asking in that community would result in no action since there are so few of us who would really benefit from that capability.

Ideas?