[apalrd]

We are currently running all of our code in Timed Loops, so the vision will always suffer first.

This way, since all of the important things (control loops mostly) MUST run at their given interval, the vision gets whatever is left. It also runs in a low priority thread.

The CPU will be pegged at 100%, but the important code should still run.

As for performance monitoring, here are your options:
-There is a block called "RT CPU usage" which tells you the CPU usage by thread priority. If you set priorities correctly, this will tell you what is using the most CPU time.
-There is a more precise performance monitoring tools in Tools->Profile, but you need to do a fairly precise test to get good data - You start the profiler, start the VI for a fairly short period of time, stop the VI, and stop the profiler. This tool will tell you execution time of each VI, which can be helpful for finding which VI's are taking too long to execute.
-There used to be a nice System Monitor somewhere in 8.6, but I have not yet found it in 2011.