I know theres a million of these threads out there, but I cant seem to find any with the same problem as me. My main problem is that the longer I play the more lag I get, but only if things spawn. I can stand around all day in haven or in the same area of the clockwork and my lag wont change, however the more I spawn enemies (or explosions when its really laggy), the slower my framerate gets. All I need to do is close the client and reopen it and its fine, but this can be a hassle if i dont want to leave a party and lose tokens to restart. Plus when it gets unbearable i let down the team. This also has stopped me getting the dungeon delver achievement, and ruins lockdown after awhile (since i have to restart every few games). Once the lag starts, bombs and the polaris make it much worse.
I play on a Sony Vaio (gift, not bought lol). 2.3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 3gbs ram. My Java is up to date. Graphics are on low. I tried a few of the flags on this thread* (-server and -Xincgc since I use the steam SK). They both seemed to make the game slower, although im not sure if -server is making it better in the long run, feels like it gets worse quicker. I use vista. Can anyone think of what the problem is? All i can think of is that its not removing the spawned monsters once killed from memory.. and i dont even know if thats possible.
*http://forums.spiralknights.com/en/node/12849#comment-199678
Knowing Vaios its probably running into memory management problems. Unfortunately for you, the switches don't work because both Steam and Getdown are kind of backsswards on argument handling..... actually it doesn't handle them at all, I was just looking for an excuse to use backasswards.
Short of doing a bat2exe hack, you can try installing Java7 and copy the files into Steam's java_vm folder. JRE7 has memory management improvements, so it might be able to mitigate the problem. You should also take the time to update your video card drivers from the chip manufacture's site (don't use the Sony ones unless theres no other choice).
And just for the sake of sanity, you'll want to unbloat your system by uninstalling unused Windows features, and every piece of Vaio software except the system recovery and maintenance suite. Everything else that came with it is utter crap. I would also recommend switching Anti-virus to MS Security Essentials... free, light weight, and works well enough against obvious infections.