The advent of multicore systems combined with the lower rate of increase in single processor performance means that it has become necessary for developers to turn to threading to continue to increase performance at historical rates. This is particularly important for processor intensive applications such as Maya and associated plug-ins.

This chapter gives an introduction to multithreading in the context of writing plug-ins. It assumes no prior knowledge of threading, and presents an overview of this topic as a prelude to a discussion of threading in Maya.