I have personally worked on the performance of vtkGeometryFilter (used in vtkPVGeometryFilter) and vtkPolyDataNormals.
@Francois_Mazen
Also, i was not aware that vtkPVGeometryFilter can optionally compute cell normals. Personally i think this option should be deprecated, since we are planning to introduce normals computation somehow in the representation level.
A vtkDataRepresentatio, such as vtkGeometryRepresentation, is basically a geometry filter and a mapper or just a mapper for most cases. So if we want both VTK and ParaView to benefit from this work, vtkPolyDataMapper (parent class of vtkCompositePolyDataMapper used in vtkPVGeometryFIlter) should call vtkPolyDataNormals. If we want only ParaView to benefit from this work then vtkGeometryRepresentation should call vtkPolyDataNormals. We can decide which one is more useful.
@aron.helser
Personally, I would like to split vtkPolyDataNormals in two filters in the future, One that fixes, orientation, consistency, and splitting that we could name vtkFixPolyData (or something else), and one that does the actual normal for points or cells computation named vtkPolyDataNormals which can optionally use vtkFixPolyData using the orientation, consistency, and splitting flags. I would like to do that to simplify vtkPolyDataNormals which right now seems too complicate while it should not.
I was not aware of such an issue but if the code is hanging please post an issue on VTK with a dataset, and assuming there is funding, i can explore it.