Is there a hotkey sequence to instantly interupt a long cook?

Escape seems to cook on till it's happy ending the cook.
-mikey

Esc is your best option. Sometimes you have to hit it a few times because Houdini may interrupt one cook and then start another (depending on the situation). I usually just hit Esc repeatedly until all cooking stops. There are probably some cases where this still won't interrupt the cook instantly, but you can usually get control back in a few seconds.

Mark

There is a button at the top right hand of the screen where you can choose “always”, “changes”, or “never” which refers to updating the screen. You could change this setting to “never” so that you can navigate through a heavy file- without waiting forever and then click“update” when you want to see results. This helps me when I have heavy files.

The only catch is if you have a single particular node that is cooking/evaluating. The interrupt won't be caught until that SOP finishes cooking. In that case, you just have to wait.

Most (all?) ops check whether they've been interrupted even during the cook itself.