Focus keeps shifting back to primary machine

Monday, September 12, 2005 by Jim Park | Discussion: Multiplicity

I've got MP 1.02. After I connect the two machines, when I switch over to the secondary machine, after a few seconds (anywhere from 1 second to 10 seconds), the focus will shift right back to the primary machine's corner of the screen. I changed the switching options to lock the mouse and keyboard to current desktop and then using the hotkeys to switch over but that also does not keep the focus on the second machine for long. This is extremely irritating... it is basically unusable. Every couple of words I type, I have to roll the mouse over the screen again to get focus on the second machine. This focus change will also happen when I just move the mouse in circles.

Please tell me 1.03 is coming out soon and that it will fix this issue!
6 Reply 4 Referrals
Jim Park
Reply #1 Monday, September 12, 2005 7:13 PM
I've turned off clipboard sharing and this still happens. I've tried both with and without quick detection of disconnected secondary machines. This is extremely frustrating.

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Jim Park
Reply #2 Monday, September 12, 2005 7:13 PM
I also notice that when I run the mouse in circles in smooth motion, the mouse will halt at points which seems to indicate that there is some sort of a stall in getting the data for the mouse move over the network. The network between the machines are pretty fast. There's <1ms ping times. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

(Sorry about the double post -- I edited this second post to add more information.)

Neil Banfield
Reply #3 Tuesday, September 13, 2005 2:25 AM
If you set a ping running between the machines (using ping ipaddr -t), do the ping times alter much when you move the mouse in circles?  Try from both the primary to the secondary & secondary to primary.

Jim Park
Reply #4 Tuesday, September 13, 2005 12:50 PM
Looks like the problem is gone today. I have no control over the network traffic at work. But I do wish I had control over the lag sensitivity of the Multiplicity program. If it seems like network performance is poor, I can up the threshhold and still use MP at the expense of responsiveness.

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Neil Banfield
Reply #5 Thursday, September 15, 2005 4:58 AM

If you have firewire ports on both PCs then you could buy a cable & setup a private firewire link between the 2.  Instant fast reliable 400Mbits/sec private LAN.

BTW a network being a little slow should not cause MP to disconnect.  It might make the mouse laggy when the network gets slow, but thats unavoidable.  Only a network which either loses packets, or takes more than 5 seconds to do a 'ping' will cause a disconnect.

If you have quick detection of disconnected machines on then the time above switches to 100ms or so.  So don't enable that on a laggy network!

We might add a switch to prevent MP from ever discovering a disconnect and see if that helps or not.


Keil Wilson
Reply #6 Thursday, September 29, 2005 2:58 PM
I just downloaded 1.02 today and installed it on my primary and one of my two secondary machines. Everything worked great (including file copy finally ). I was using version 1.0 on all of my machines before. One of my secondary machines was still on version 1.0. When I tried to use that machine, I noticed the same behavior you described Jim. It was almost like there was a timer and on some regular interval that thing would fire and move control of the mouse and keyboard back to my main PC. Working quickly in between focus switches, I installed version 1.02 on the problem PC and the problem went away. I'm a happy camper now.

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