Vendor-specific OpenMP Issues

By default Intel OpenMP threads stay active and spin for 200ms after they complete a task. The spin makes the threads fast to restart, but it consumes CPU cycles. 200ms is a very long time to spin for an application like Maya, since a single OpenMP loop evaluated as part of an animation playing at any more than 5fps could keep all CPUs busy spinning all the time. Such spinning would interfere with other threads in the application and also other applications on the system. For this reason we explicitly set the spin-wait time to zero in Maya, and only use nonzero values temporarily for specific closely packed loops where the spinning produces a noticeable performance benefit, being sure to reset it to zero afterwards.
If you are using Intel OpenMP in a plug-in, and want to set a nonzero spin-wait time you can include the Intel compiler version of the header file omp.h and then use the kmp_set_blocktime() function. However, be very careful to set the spin wait time back to zero before exiting the plug-in and returning control to Maya: kmp_set_blocktime(0);
Microsoft OpenMP threads do not spin-wait, and therefore do not have the above concern. However this can lead to lower performance where multiple threaded regions are run in close succession, as the thread pool must be woken up each time.
Guided scheduling is unreliable in the OpenMP implementation of Visual Studio 2005, sometimes producing incorrect results. It appears to be fixed in Visual Studio 2008, but plug-ins for Maya require the use of Visual Studio 2005, so take great care to test results, or avoid using this scheduling model with this version of the compiler.