What's New in Director 8.5 > Using the Shockwave Multiuser Server and Xtra > Optimizing multiuser movies > Prioritizing receiving over sending |  |

Prioritizing receiving over sending

In most cases, you will want your movies to receive incoming messages before sending messages, since the contents of incoming messages may affect the information you want to send.

One way to accomplish this is to increase the frame rate of your movie. The Multiuser Xtra checks for incoming messages during idle periods between frames, so higher frame rates will cause the Xtra to check for messages more often. If you don't want to increase the frame rate, you can set the `idleHandlerPeriod` to 0 in Lingo. This will maximize the frequency of idle events and allow the Xtra to check for messages during frames as well as between them.

You can tell the Xtra to check for messages at any moment you wish by using the `checkNetMessages()` function. Or you can find out how many messages are waiting by using `getNumberWaitingNetMessages()`. This allows you to specify a number of messages to retrieve as a parameter of `checkNetMessages()` so any backlog of messages can be handled all at once.