I've been having some severe lag issues with running Spiral Knights and was hoping that there might be some solution buried somewhere here in the forums. After searching and reading through about a dozen threads, I can't find a 100% definite solution. From a few of the threads, I could glean that the cases most similar to mine were from fellow Mac users, though there were some cases of Windows users running into the same things. Going into more detail, most people who posted said their computers could run other games just fine, even with the highest settings, but Spiral Knights just can't run efficiently for some reason.
From what I can gather, there seems to be some problem with certain versions of Mac OSX (namely Leopard and Snow Leopard) and their Java compatibility. Some silly thing about Apple saying they would do Java updates and such, then never actually doing it or making poorly optimized versions or some such. They are going to be handing the maintenance responsibilities back over to Oracle (the developers for Java) soon, but there's no definite word on when that will happen or if that would even fix the problem. According to some forumites, upgrading the OS to Lion for Macs apparently fixes the problem for the most part, though that isn't an option for some people (myself included). There's some more in-depth minor fixes that have been posted by admins, but I think I'd rather try to find another way. (I've never really been good with changing lines of coding and usually break things...)
So. Aside from those fixes, is there some other fix for the lag issues? If it is a problem with Java, would updating the Java version the computer runs on fix it? Or even if there is a specific version that works best? Or is it more internal with how certain OS run Java?
I really hope someone with more technical knowledge can help me and others with this. Thanks!
Here's some of the threads I found that touched on the issue:
http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/12849
http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/32575
http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/46161
http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/15424
Admin FPS fixes post: http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/12849?page=2#comment-199145
They warn not to try it unless you're kinda tech-savvy. It could lead to some things breaking if not done properly.
I can confirm that upgrading to Lion (or Mountain Lion) fixes this problem entirely. I was running snow leopard and the lag was unbearable. Vana was unable to be played and JK/Twins lagged almost beyond playability. I tried everything, and found nothing to alleviate the problem. It has something to do with java in SL and Leopard. No idea the exact issue description but I do know that it is an inherent problem and that all Mac users running Snow Leopard or Leopard experience this issue.
Your only option to alleviate or improve this problem is to upgrade to Lion or MLion. If this isn't an option, I'm sorry, SK will remain it's laggy self. I did find that if I restart my computer, opened nothing but Steam then SK, then the lag would be a bit less, but this is hardly notable, as vana was still unplayable (due to the fire shooters making the screen freeze).
Updating java does nothing, more ram does nothing, and reinstalling steam or SK does nothing to fix this problem. The only fix that has worked has been the upgrade, so I'd reconsider the option, as Spiral Knights is an amazing game in my opinion.