When my girlfriend and I play Spiral Knights together, one or both of us suffers performance issues compared to when we play solo (at the same time).
The most commonly occurring problem is when we get on a lift and choose to descend, my screen will hang before the loading screen (I see the depth we just finished at the top, the depth we're going to at the bottom and the descend button). This only seems to happen on depths that are actual levels. The game never seems to hang when descending to the Terminals and Moorcroft Manor.
Sometimes it hangs for 10 minutes and then starts loading the game, other times it hangs until I dc and am booted back to haven, other times (becoming more frequent) it hangs indefinitely and I have to close and re-open the game (and even then, getting back in and continuing play isn't guaranteed, not to mention the energy and time lost).
Less frequently, my girlfriend will start to lag and then disconnect whilst I have no apparent issues. She will log back in, lag and disconnect again, then be fine on the next log in.
As I touched on before, neither of us has any trouble while playing solo, even if we are online playing at the same time.
General internet connection speed doesn't seem to be affected when we have any of these issues either.
My pc is the better of the two; Windows Vista Ultimate, 2.4Ghz Intel Core2 Quad CPU, 2GB ram, up to date Java and Graphics drivers (nvidea GeForce 8800 GTS).
Guessing at gf's pc spec being Windows XP, 1.6Ghz AMD, 2GB ram, up to date java, probably not graphics (nvidea 6600 iirc), but then hers isn't the main offender it's mine :S
Does anyone have any ideas as to what might be the cause of the problem?
Just a shot in the dark at the moment, but you're problem likes to show up sort of whenever, right? Perhaps it might be worth while so see if your network adapter has a driver update available.
I've also found that if something is flogging your hard drive you will suffer some huge loading time delays.