WHAT IS THIS NONSENSE :S

Yesterday When I started spiral knights it was lagging, The dot was on 2 and 1 all the time.
I tried diffrent things lower the settings off all kind even on my computer.
And when that wasn't enuff I reinstalled the game. So when I relogged it went even worse :S.
Its on 1 Dot all the time :S.
1 Week ago I was playing So fine at 3 dots.
Whats this all about ?
If this keeps up I won't be online for a while or just quit.
Thx for reading.
And I could use some usefull help.

I have tried everthing,
Reconnect the internet...
Nothing changed. Disabled my Internet connection vieuw to others..
Still the same :S
There is no fun if I keep teleporting in this game :S.

It is the Halloween event, I'm pretty sure. The servers will probably not be so packed next week. Last night I was down to 1-2 bars in the final room of FSC, died there for the first time in a long while... on spikes. Fortunately the connection picked back up for the boss fight.

Ouch, yeah most likely because the Halloween event is ending shortly

My bars are always at a constant 2 on low graphics (occasionally dropping to 1, and sometimes jumps to 3 on easy parts), with a bit of action-delay (lack of EU servers be darned) but I have been noticing more lag-spikes knocking me around the levels. Aside from the increased frequency of lag-spikes, nothing new on my part, but I do hope that it all stops with the ending of the Hallowe'en event.

Hopefully youre right
If not then the lag would be a reason to quit for me.
I won't play spiral knights if I start teleporting everywhere.
Won't waste my time trying

I tried this, and my client now stops responding and refuses to recover, leaving me to force-shut javaw.exe through task manager and re-booting the game to continue. This is either a very badly timed coincidence, or it actually makes matters worse.
I normally get lag spikes when playing (usually a three-beat lag bounce every 30 seconds or so) but last night was particularly bad. I just figured it was because we were doing a shadow lair, which are generally places filled with lag. I'm hoping things will settle after the event is done, but I'm not going to bet on it...
Oh, and for the record, I know my lag has nothing to do with graphics, so changing those settings is unlikely to help you much. It's all about the conection, usually the lack thereof with whatever server/Amazon cloud 3R is running SK off of.
-Droganis

The ""dots"" on the upper right corner (those are BARS and not DOTS) is a average of the response between the server and the client (you).
It's usually measured by the amount of data that it's being sent/received and time response between both parts.
There are many factors that can affect the performance, and the main one is your internet conection.
Your location can affect your game experience due to delay (I'm from Argentina so i've always 210 ms and that's two bars or one).
You can measure the ping between you and the server by doing ping to spiral knights server or some other instance hosted in the same place. (They are a EC2 instance hosted in Amazon AWS)
In this case we will ping "184.73.168.101" to know if we are the problem (it is not from Spiral Knights, but is hosted in the same amazon's cluster).
We go to start, command promt (Start > Execute > "cmd") and we'll see something like this if you are in Windows.
C:\>ping 184.73.168.101
Pinging 184.73.168.101 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 184.73.168.101: bytes=32 time=227ms TTL=53
Reply from 184.73.168.101: bytes=32 time=202ms TTL=53
Reply from 184.73.168.101: bytes=32 time=205ms TTL=53
Reply from 184.73.168.101: bytes=32 time=208ms TTL=53
I've 208 ms (I'm really far from the US), that's why I do always have 2 or 1 bar. I'm really used to it, sometimes is quite annoying.
100 ms or less can be great.
Another thing to say is that the person who's first on the party list is the one hosting the enviroment (monsters, gates and those things).
I just figured it because when I play with my brother (witch is in the same network) the monsters instantly are being bumped when I use my shield nerby, when I join a foreign party i've a HUGH delay but i'm so used to it.
The game isn't enterally (sega servers <--> you), it's more quite P2P (player to player/s).
Also, the bars on the upper corner are measured between you and the main server.
I hope this helps a little!.

if it really is simply due to the high number of players on because of halloween, I sure hope they are better prepared for when christmas comes around

It'll probably be worse. The major downside of AWS/EC2 hosting is that your sharing traffic with a LOT of online shops, several streaming systems (including Netflix), and your buried pretty deep in the network. QOS could take care of a lot of that, but you can bet they charge insane amounts of money for priority.... plus *points at Netflix*.
Expanding the instances wouldn't be difficult, but it would be expensive as hell. Without having a peak at the server metrics, its hard to tell what the best approach to the load problem would be.
I am having very bad problems with micro-freezing in the game, I wouldn't call it lag...lag to me in any other game is things keep moving and happening but in a nonsensical way, delays in execution of button presses, etc, and then everything speeds up to catch up. I've played 80man Everquest raids on a 56k connection over a decade ago, WoW on DSL doing oldschool large raids....I know lag, this is not that kind of lag. To top it off i'm now i'm on 100mbps fiber-optic connection to my home (speedtest @95mbps via cat-6 with average ping of 5-8ms in online games) -- this 'lag' seems more like a memory leak to me.
I am experiencing the most minute freeze as monsters spawn in large groups or I try to defend/move in certain areas. sometimes nothings going on im just running around a corner in a dungeon by myself. This just started happening with the last patch. my computer is a 6core 3.4ghz win7pro with a 1gb GDDR5 videocard and 8gb of ram. This game should play flawlessly graphic wise no matter what level or graphic setting or how many bombs are going off at 1 time :) My 3DMARK benchmarks are very very good, so why the glitching here? The only other game I have right now installed is Starcraft2 and it plays with insane settings 40-60fps always.
frustrated!!! I've died way too many times because of this glitch and really hope it gets fixed b4 a really amazing mmo comes out to pull me away from this.

@Slartybart: Thats a completely different issue. The game is written in Java, and there are a few major limits on the performance ceiling that a $5000 rig can't bypass. And before you break off into the "my rig is god" tangent, this was done as a logical trade off to run on multiple platforms since the rest of the system requirements are relatively low.
The hitches will vary from patch to patch, depending on whats been modified, but until AMD gets OpenGL working again, everyone who owns those cards are going to be worse off. Speaking of which, has anyone else tried the special Rage drivers to see how it affects this game? Dogrock was playing around with it, but it fell to the wayside.
@Starlinvf, is it a different issue? should I start its own thread?
also....what special drivers are you talking about for ATI?
I've already broken off into that tangent, and the intention of doing so is to reinforce to whomever moderates these posts/problems/reports that it is NOT
A) my computers core ability to perform the tasks this game has to dish out
B) my internet connection as it is 100mbps fiber
I mean if I posted 'omg my game keeps completely locking up for a split second when lots of action happens on the screeen' -- most people would reply, whats your system like? free up ram, close down startup programs, background programs, omg your video card is WEAK get a new one, etc etc.....I'm clarifying my problem, which leads to quicker resolutions....i hope?
Especially when so many people are complaining about lag and other problems since the last patch, my problem started since the last patch. There is a known video setting bug that did not exist previously with invisible knights, so something is else up besides some players being invisible and at least should be addressed to the community a little more,
'hey players who pay our bills, we recognize that your dying out there from bugs and its costing you money/energy/time which pays more of our bills, but we're working on it as hard as we can, we vow entire boxes of krispy kreems and gallons of coffee will be consumed until this is fixed'
:)

I've still got the Rage drivers running, however they sometimes result in fullscreen corruption. Being a release with no official AMD support it was better not to use them in troubleshooting. However, yesterday's Catalyst 11.10 release has the fixes from the Rage drivers. In the end I'm not sure weather or not a reduced delay in monster spawns was placebo or not. Still, with an official release it can't hurt to give it a try.
As for the reliable "hitching" some users get every 10 to 15 seconds after playing for a while, this does not appear to be graphics related. I've made it appear on Intel and AMD systems (No NVidia to test here). It does not appear to be a memory leak or tied to specific client releases as far as I've been able to confirm so far. It does appear to be memory related, but more due to an artificial cap. More on that pending some more fiddling. Though killing javaw.exe via Task Manager when it starts remains a fairly reliable means of getting the client to a "clean" state without loosing any progress.
Observations of it suddenly getting worse after an update is a bit of confirmatory bias; it's always there waiting to happen. Go into areas that use more props and you're far more likely to see it.
Thanks for the reply, I updated my raedon drivers to yesterdays update, and been alt-tabbing out of SK to clear the java cache every level or two to see if that helps.
I noticed this very very rarely happens in Tier1 (probably why I did not notice this post-patch a few days ago, as after patch is when I gained access to T2 and then T3 yesterday), I was unable notice it during pvp at all in the hour I played this evening right after quitting dungeon crawling due to the lag.
No improvements with either, killing javaws.exe terminates the game so I don't see how that is a viable option mid dungeon crawl (unless going Link Dead allows you access back into your previous team).
I did see in the java control panel that Java seems limited to 32mb of memory, max.
I'm now curious if OpenJava or running under Linux would change the performance of the game (for better or worse)

It shows you as disconnected, so the game puts you in a semi-dead state for a few minutes to let you reconnect.
I have no idea! The same thing happens to me! It might have something to do with the internet connection.