A method and an apparatus for activity based execution scheduling are described. Activities may be tracked among a plurality of threads belonging to a plurality of processes running in one or more processors. Each thread may be associated with one of the activities. Each activity may be associated with one or more of the threads in one or more of the processes for a data processing task. The activities may be ordered by a priority order. A group of the threads may be identified to be associated with a particular one of the activities with highest priority based on the priority order. A thread may be selected from the identified threads for next scheduled execution in the processors.