Notification is the process of telling interested objects that this object has changed. Notification is needed to make engines and sensors function, is used to keep
SoPaths up to date when the scene graph's topology
changes, and is also used to invalidate rendering or bounding box caches.
Notification is normally enabled, but can be disabled on a node by node (or engine by engine) basis. If you are making extensive
changes to a large part of the scene graph then disabling notification can increase performance, at the expense of increased responsibility for making sure that any interested engines, sensors or paths
are kept up to date.
For example, if you will be making a lot of changes to a small part of your scene graph and you know that there are no engines or sensors attached to nodes in that part of the scene
graph, you might disable notification on the nodes you are changing, modify them, re-enable notification, and then touch() one of the nodes to cause a redraw.
However, you should profile your application
and make sure that notification is taking a significant amount of time before going to the trouble of manually controlling notification.