I am working on a character rig with some heavy procedural geometry constrained to the control. I am looking for a way to stop the calculation of geometry node like “vdb from polygon” from running when I am animating the controls. I tried turning off the display attribute in the Render tab but it's still running even though it's not shown in the viewport.

Dive into your network and wait for the VDB From Polygons to calculate. Then click the Lock icon on that node. Now that node will never refresh and it's current state will be saved with the hip file.

However, the reason it is updating is because your controls are changing something upstream which causes the node to refresh. Once you lock the node, your controls may not work as expected.

The simplest solution is to just set a higher value (i.e. lower quality) on the VDB construction node then the conversion to polygons will just run faster.

My display toggle worked again for some reason, it completely disable the calculation inside the node. Great answer though