speed up maya 2011 on xeon systems

Here is something interesting that I have come across, if you are using Maya 2011 on Xeon system and are faced with speed issues, you might want to disable the Parallel memory variable. I, as most people on a mac have noticed some issues with the amount of time it takes to open the hypershade, or to go from the attributes tab back to the channels tab, after changing this ENV setting, all that stuff including viewport switching was markedly faster and smoother.

“Set this environment variable to 1 to disable parallel memory copy. In some cases, parallel memory copy is faster on Opteron and Nehalem based systems. However, it may also be slower on Xeon systems, in which case you may want to disable parallel memory.”

Where is the ENV file to edit?

(Windows)
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents\maya\[version] C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents\maya
(Mac OS X)
/Users/[username]/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/version
/Users/[username]/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya
(Linux)
~/maya/version
~/maya

Once you have found the ENV file, simply open in in a text editor and add the line MAYA_NO_PARALLEL_MEMCPY = 1 (setting maya environmental variables are written as <NAME> = <value>)if there are other modifications added to the file, just drop down to another line and add the No Parallel = 1 line. Ensure that you sae the file as ASCII though. If you don’t have an ENV file in any directory, you can just make one, it is just a text file. If you are making an ENV file, it has to be named Maya.env With the proper capitalizations.