Are there really 16000 sims now?

The blog post 'several regions offline following outage' said that about 5% of the servers were offline, representing around 800 regions. At 4 regions per server, that works out to 16000 sims total. But July's Key Metrics note that total land mass (islands and mainland combined) in SL is 779.95 square kilometers, which works out to almost 12000 sims total (1 square kilometer = 15.26 sims). Which is a lot.

But 4000 sims between today and the end of July? Are there servers online that have fewer than 4 sims per server?

maybe that includes the servers in Brighton which have no sims on them.

Could well be. The stats page lists the number private islands at 10124, that could put the mainland at about 6000 sims.

http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php

Edited to add: I remember back in my early days of Mentoring when I would proudly state for a newbie "there are over 1000 sims in SL now!!"

The phrase "about 5%" has less than one significant digit. I think that can explain the discrepancies in the OP.

Most likely there still are. Ther are various posts around talking about the older hardware and the sim count on each. Class 2 only had 1 sim per server, and class 3 had 2 sims. Class 4 and 5 each have 4 sims per server. There is no way to tell exactly how many of the older systems are operating, or how many have failed and been replaced.

Sometimes I think this is why my class 3 seems to run better than many class 4 & 5, because it's only one of a pair for a server to worry about.