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Experiencing strange behavior and insane resource usage


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I am trying to use Synergy to control a Windows VM that is being run using PCI passthrough of a GPU under a Linux host.  Basically sharing my mouse and keyboard between two virtual machines that are actually running on the same hardware.

It has been a bumpy ride though.  If I keep Synergy running in the standard absolute position mode everything seems fine.  But if I want to do some gaming in this VM (it's one of the reasons I'm trying this setup) it's really necessary to turn on the "Use relative mouse moves" mode.  And that works fine at first.  I move my mouse cursor over to the Windows VM, hit scroll lock to keep it there, and start whatever game I'm playing and it seems to be all good.

But occasionally Synergy just wiggs out on me.  I don't know how else to describe it.  The whole VM freezes up for a couple seconds, usually associated with an ear-grating sound loop.  Eventually it starts moving again but my control has been kicked back to the host machine.  And I do have scroll lock on and it's not like the cursor just left the edge of the screen or something because it always starts dead center on the host.  Like the whole thing has been reset to some default.  Then I have to turn scroll lock off to even get the cursor back to the VM (like I said, it was on!) and half the time it will just do the same thing again when I try to get control back.  Freeze up and kick the cursor back to the middle.  I can get control back eventually but it often takes several attempts.  And it just seems totally random whether it will work or not...

Now it sounds like this could be an issue with the VM itself but I also tried without Synergy and with a second mouse and keyboard passed through to the VM and never experienced this sort of behavior.  It only happens when using Synergy.

And here's something else really crazy.  After suffering through several of these events I looked at the task manager in my Windows VM.  Synergy was using 1.4 GB of memory.  Yes, gigabytes.  For friggin Synergy.  It had the highest memory usage of anything that was running at the time.

After restarting Synergy I played around for a bit while keeping the task manager open and I noticed the memory usage started pretty normal but it would jump up a bit every time one of these events happened.  And never go back down.

So that's about it.  I know my setup probably isn't exactly normal but for me at least these behavior, as bizarre as it is, is totally reproducible.  It happens every time I try to use Synergy in a game with relative mouse moves on.  Which unfortunately makes the whole program kind of useless for me.

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