You don’t need to know about node behavior in order to do skinning effectively. If you are new to skinning, you can skip this section. However, familiarity with node behavior can provide you with more control over the performance of skinned objects.
For each object in your scene, if there has been any change to its node or any of the nodes in its history (its input or output nodes), Maya evaluates the nodes and updates the display. A skinned object has more nodes in its history than an object unaffected by skinning or deformers. If you have many skinned objects in your scene, you can improve the display performance by editing the node behavior attributes of the skinned nodes.