jack linden Talks on concierge site these r his replies:

[4:40] Jack Linden: Diamond: for us as a business and for the many customers affected by poor performance as Openspaces scale up
[4:40] Jack Linden: Dimentox: We have talked about technical throttles, and we may yet move in that direction if we decided, for example, to create a truly light use region type with hard script/agent limits
[4:41] Jack Linden: oof lots of text, hang on..
[4:42] Jack Linden: Clubside, it's more that load levels on these regions has been far higher than their intended purpose. We've had Openspaces for a long while now, but after the Land Store v2 opened, this issue got very quickly worse
[4:43] Jack Linden: Simone, it's not just about prims. It's aboutscript load, agents, textures, traffic and so on.
[4:44] Jack Linden: Coal: of course we hoped they would be popular, and they were, but the load level has shot up. and that means effectively that 2 Openspaces can cause more load than 1 normal region, which makes them not just cheap, but unviable.
[4:46] Jack Linden: Rene: it's not overnight, it's 2 bill dates away more or less. (60+ days). I know it's a significant hit, but we felt it was the right step to take.
[4:47] Jack Linden: Stephen, effects of a product like this on our back end systems do not come to light instantly - it has been a developing situation that become more pressing in September as we started to see performance being affected by Openspaces
[4:48] Jack Linden: Margot: there are two sides to this. One is about correct use, the other is about us financially recognising the extra costs in supporting this product
[4:49] Jack Linden: Stephen; that would have been ideal, yes.
[4:50] Jack Linden: Master: try to keep this constructive please. Of course we care about our customers. And many of those customers are getting a poor experience right now because of this issue.
[4:52] Jack Linden: Stephen: I totally understand the frustration. And we'll be reading every piece of feedback we get and considering every option available, as we always do.
[4:53] Jack Linden: Muli: no we are not. we're a privately owned company
[4:55] Jack Linden: yes, that is why I'm here - to talk to as many people as possible and get your feedback.
[4:56] Jack Linden: SexyAnn.. free conversions to normal regions is an option. We'll give that some thought if it would help
[4:57] Jack Linden: Careltje; feedback is essential, of course. the problems are clear. if it makes sense for us to change tack, as with any area of policy, we would review it.
[4:58] Jack Linden: Coal: interesting question. I'd have to look into that
[4:59] Jack Linden: Clubside.. yes. the 4 openspaces on a CPU share not just the cpu, but also the Memory for all 16 on that server, and the bandwidth for all 16 too
[4:59] Jack Linden: a very loaded openspace can and does impact all 16 on that server if it's bad enough
[5:01] Jack Linden: okay so here is a question; do you think us pinning prim counts down to say 1500, and limiting script count to 250, would be acceptable if the price stayed as it now? I'm not suggesting this is possible, but I'm interested in your opinions
[5:03] Jack Linden: Simone: that is certainly possible
[5:04] Jack Linden: Coal: thanks. and yes I am. keep it constructive please. I'm here because I know how signficant this change is. So let's talk it through
[5:05] Jack Linden: Pippen, it was just a number as part of a theorteical question.
[5:06] Jack Linden: Coal: many are already way past 1875 prims.
[5:07] Jack Linden: SexyAnn: something like that is feasible
[5:07] Jack Linden: We'll look at that
[5:08] Jack Linden: Careltje: both are important.
[5:09] Jack Linden: Equinox: let me try to explain..
[5:10] Jack Linden: we have been selling OS regions as a quarter of a normal region. But the land area is the same. So, lets say normal regions have a load of 1, you'd expect Openspaces if used as originally intended to have a load of 0.25. But in fact they have a load of over 0.5
[5:10] Jack Linden: So that really adds up to a lot of extra load on servers with 16 Openspaces on
[5:10] Jack Linden: Rather than an Openspace server = Normal server in load, it's actually double
[5:11] Jack Linden: Rachel: this is an emerging issue, as the number of Openspaces increased, the back end load issues start to be more clear
[5:12] Jack Linden: Hard limits for all areas, such as textures, traffic, content etc.. aren't supported currently in the simulator. It's an option down the line but would take time to build and QA
[5:13] Jack Linden: Dimentox: you mean extra charges based on load? That's in interesting one, but hard to do fairly as load varies continually
[5:14] Jack Linden: Simone: yes.. lets keep talking. the price rises are 2 months away.
[5:15] Jack Linden: Stephen: despite your frustration on this issue, do you think we have become better at being open and discussing these issues in advance of them taking place?
[5:16] Jack Linden: Simone: exactly. I would hope we all want the best for Second Life ultimately.
[5:18] Jack Linden: Master: I can't promise action or change in a meeting like this and you wouldn't expect me to, but I can promise to listen and to go back and discuss the community's views with my colleagues.
[5:19] Jack Linden: JenniferBugg: yes.. you should feel able to tell us how you feel.
[5:20] Jack Linden: cheers Dimentox
[5:21] Jack Linden: Equinox: to fully bolt down the various usage areas of an Openspace technically would take time. But i've taken note of your views on that
[5:21] Jack Linden: Master: that simply isn't true. the new mainland areas are a drop in the ocean compared to the volume of estate land sold each month
[5:21] Jack Linden: it's a blip
[5:23] Jack Linden: I hear you JenniferBugg. I'm getting slammed in IMs, emails and this chat, doing my best to reply to as much as I can
[5:24] Jack Linden: Sorry to hear that Master. If you want to discuss it more at a later point we can do that too.
[5:25] Jack Linden: River: do you mean disabling estate land sales completely?
[5:25] Jack Linden: for openspaces
[5:26] Jack Linden: Stephen, agreed, this is a discussion. Let's see where it goes
[5:26] Jack Linden: King: that's a bold suggestion!
[5:28] Jack Linden: River: I know this is hard, but in all things like this we're basically walking a line trying to balance our own real world business needs with the needs and wished of our customers; it makes decisions like this very difficult
[5:28] Jack Linden: But we do see it as a discussion, and we do listen
[5:29] Jack Linden: no-one has ever sold something like Openspaces before. All of this is new territory, so there are no real world models we can apply to know how things will progress.
[5:30] Jack Linden: by the way.. i see a ton of you have direct IMed me.. apologies that I haven't replied. too much text! 
[5:30] Equinox Pinion: you could see from these sims what the load will be
[5:31] Jack Linden: Coal: we had not expected the demand or load increase; it would have been hard to predict
[5:37] Jack Linden: okay, so lets summarise a little: I hear you on OS limits, and I hear you on the other options like free conversions. I won't obviously be making any promises in this discussion which is an ad-hoc one because I wanted to get as much feedback as I could.. but I will take all of this away and discuss it within the Lab. *if* there are outcomes or changes, then we should make those clear sooner rather than later
[5:37] Jack Linden: I completely take on board how significant this is to many of you

Price is an issue, I need it to stay at the $75 if it doesn't then I will have to close up shop. If I close up shop I will expect a refund. However, if Linden does keep it at the $75, then possibly I can move things around to help lower the load. I would need some help with the evaluation, of what is causing heavy load and how to lighten it. I would like to know what issues are negotiable and which are not. But in all honesty, this is more stress and frustration then RL. I truely hope these lengthy discussions for once will favor the community,

Funny, I have not seen any actual engineering metrics about this soi dissant OS problems.

I actually monitor my OS sims, and they run fine...even with 40 agents in them.

So, SHOW ME THE NUMBERS.


If not now, when? If not us, who?

Thousands of SL residents will suffer under this new LL ruling on Openspace sims. If you are one of them, or know one of them, and they are moral, support them. Write a message to every Linden you can find on search, and IM them a copy of it; put the message in a notecard and drop it in all of their profiles; post the message to this forum, with additional comments; post your message ini Jira; open LL trouble tickets and post your message; find blogs about SL and post your message there again and again.

Define the message and repeat it to all who will listen and to all who will not.

It worked for Gandhi.

Give it a shot.

@ Klang

Not sure I agree with your spam level as it will only dilute at this point.

But I definitely agree with seeing some hard numbers on the issue.

Also, hard numbers from LL on usage. Total time will do, that is all we need to be certain regions are with the "rules".

Without set limits from LL, people will do what we do best in SL. Push the limits...

Agreed, except on your use of the word spam.

I'm talking about a political rhetorical style that has proven to be effective in the past.

Seriously.

raymon: Do you have the whole transcript? With just Jack's words, I can't tell what's going on.
.

Klang,

you answered your own question. Running 40 agents in an OS means automatically you are still overusing resources, even if they are running fine (which they are, true). Simply because resources are not capped but you can peak.

A full SIM used to allow 40 residents in the past, now it allows 60 or 80? I don't know the number after the servers upgrade.

Your OS having 40 residents and paying 75 USD instead of let's say 150 USD or 120 USD (proportionally to a full SIM allowance) means POTENTIALLY you are putting LL in the red and you use resources that should be allocated to other SIMs, for your benefit.

That's NOT necessarily bad, it's how Internet webhosting works actually and shared webhosting accounts, Dedicated servers in terms of peak usage bandwidth etc. They calculate resources on average level and some people pay the same and utilize less resources and others pay the same and use 2-3x more. It's been like that in webhosting business since 1995 or so that Internet domains started to boom. Internic was not charging for .com domains at that time and started charging at 1996 and gave the rights to Netsol. Just a note to show you I know what I'm talking about. Registering a domain took days and was an email ASCII procedure with email formed parsed by a program to register.

SL provides webhosting. As simple as that. Webhosting that instead of a browser, customer uses the data stored via a nice 3D environment "virtual world".

Land is WEB HOSTING and must be treated like that in all aspects from all parties involved.

Now, my humble opinion is that Openspaces should have 20 avatars maximum since it's low use (or 1/4th of the avatars in a full SIM whatever this number is). Also estate agents should not be able to raise the limits, unless they PAY for it.

That is only fair since openspace is just 1/4th of a real SIM.

And, if LL has done its job right, they use a virtualization technique which is kernel based for isolation (chroot or similar) to duplicate SIMs in the same host server. If not, then LL shouldn't charge prices but fix their infrastructure instead by using a proper virtualization technique (note to LL: if you guys need help, IM me).

So Klang, if you ask me, you should be paying for your extra use but only if averages are as high as LL claims. For which I doubt (sorry). Agreed, there are many SIMs that are way overused but the majority have no real usage (apart from prims - but those do NOT put any more load than if put in a full SIM).

Do something quick: Find an estate person with many OS sims (you can find plenty cause they place them all next to each other typically).

Go to MAP and see how many avatars they are in those OS sims. Mark the totally empty OS also. I doubt you'll get more than 2 avatars average - at any time - to those OS altogether. Most OS will be empty or there will be 1 avatar. Wait, I just checked my neighboring OS sims. Right now (11:55pm SLT) it's less than 1 avatar average.

LL guys, I think you get my point.

Wanna solve your usage problem? Prioritize healthy OS SIMs and re-nice the ones that constantly have high usage. Your customer will on his own find another method, he will go to mainland, full SIM or just add more SIMs instead. It's called "capping" resources. And problem will magically be resolved from within. Abusing clubs will need to find a solution because their guests will be unhappy so they will leave for full SIMs as before. Put a limit to OS sims at 20 avatars or 25 (exact 1/4th of a full SIM whatever this number is). Notify estate owners + managers of overuse. Monitor the SIM avatar allocation every 5 minutes. Just run a cronjob or something from within your server code and monitor avatar usage on the SIM and NOTIFY the estate owner + managers (important is to notify managers also since a lot of people rent the OS SIM so it's more convenient for LL to spread the word to the actual user of the resource).

If you ask me personally, I would LIKE you to raise prices on OS sims. It will boost my business at least 4x. Perhaps even more. But I don't think you should do that. For your own good. People love OS sims. They want more space, they want to pay "a little more" and be "land owners". They WANT more. You are trying to murder brutally your best product. Not a very smart move. Just charge the club and huge malls or something. Or, as I said... re-nice them and make them sluggish. Technically 20 avatars in an OS sim for an hour or two a day is not overuse. I have no data to back this up but it's my feeling from spending hours and hours online every day and constantly having statistics panel on.

And please stop with the "light usage" talks about OS SIMs. You knew how they were used from always. Saying that you introduced the OS SIMs for 65k sqm of sea + 3 palms + 1 boat is insult to our intelligence. Ansche and others were renting OS sims for light residential use (in 16k sqm blocks) for ages and in Class 3 or 4 hardware. Come on... please... which side of the grid is LL visiting? We're not talking about 1 person doing that, we're talking about actual use BEFORE the new prices from many people. When you set OS sims on newer hardware, NATURALLY people bought them for residential use (which, btw, runs FINE. No... MORE THAN FINE)

You made a conscious business decision in order for people to buy thousands and thousands of OS sims and use them to have 65k sqm of land for their houses and projects (IMO very good decision business wise for SL). You can talk about "light use" but people smirk when LL says that and backs up all of its arguments on this alone...

Because the alternative is to think LL is all stupid and they kept saying "wow, there's gonna be a LOT of forests and palm trees on the grid, we got another 1000 OS sims this week and another 250.000 USD on setups to buy quads". Are you THAT stupid or incompetent? I seriously doubt that you guys are.

Thanks,

Soy Nakamori

A reply to Jack Linden also:

>>> "[5:01] Jack Linden: okay so here is a question; do you think us pinning prim counts down to say 1500, and limiting script count to 250, would be acceptable if the price stayed as it now? I'm not suggesting this is possible, but I'm interested in your opinions"

Please don't demonize words. Script count is not the problem. Script USAGE is. I have demonstrated in another post of mine how my OS SIM performs even with 2000 prims and 3600 active scripts (and 0.7ms script time).

If you're going to put hard limits, it should be on avatar usage (1/4th of full sim) and usage... script usage.

Don't kill business because it's easy for you to set a limit on script count. Especially with MONO, scripts run much better and counting them is not the proper way to limit usage. I can (everyone too) bring down a SIM with 1 script. Less scripts in a SIM does not necessarily mean less load. Depends on what the script does.

I know you said it as an example, just need to clarify too.

Again, limiting script count will not affect *my* business but it's not the right way to lower load.

Again, think about Estate owners asking for setting up their OS in 1 server (if they own 16). With no limits - make it responsibility of the estate owner to monitor their OS.

For the rest, cap resources. First of all renice the loaded OS sims. Give them less scheduling priority on Linux level. Then limit avatars to 1/4th. Then limit script usage (ms). And you will see how nicely OS market will clear from within.

Don't raise prices. You are going to ruin your own product.

If I were you (LL) I would not even write a price increase blog. I would renice the loaded ones and put them all in specific "heavy load" servers. I might even buy higher capacity servers if those heavy loaded OS were not that many. And when they complained I would tell them they heavily exceed the OS limits and they need to offload it. I would even point them to a knowledge base article on how to offload their usage (less avatars, scripts, prims). And I would keep selling OS sims like hot bread as it still is now.

You have stalled your own product. Doesn't anyone on SL have experience of webhosting? It's not rocket science what I'm saying. Any web hosting company with own infrastructure knows this.

If I were you I would only write the blog post only if I had already decided on the above and I wanted to raise prices on my best selling product x%.

It's always nicer to ask for 67% increase and finally "agree" to just 30% increase of prices.

Right?

Thanks,

Soy Nakamori

Well, in my understanding a company has to be professional enough to estimate their costs before they release a product; moreover pimp it up with extra prims etc.

What must be also clear, is that costumer who are paying for a product, will always take the most advantage out of it, even if this means exploit. Every child knows that.

In Austria and Germany, we had severall law sues against internet service providers, which promised flat rates and as they saw, how much people can download in month, they startet do do the same as LL. The highered prices with arguments and TOS which were completly irrelevant toward signed contracts between the costumer and the company.

(Fishing for costumers and than turning over the contracts works only for Governments not for private companies, even they "play" a government. )

The outcome: Dozens of law sues against these companies. These companies had no chance at all and lost all their law sues. The best point here was, that either TOS nor explaines counted infront of the court, only the simple fact that people signed contracts.

Contracts must not be changed, if they turn disadvantages to the partners. I am not sure if this is the same in US, but I bet.

Form an european perspective, LL will not have any chance infront of any court not only in Germany or Austria, France or Great Britain to get right infront of any court. Jursist and judges are already discussing this ongoing heavily.

The only thing which is open, is how high a financial refund for the costumer after a lost law sue by LL. European courts are relatively realistic, but in US, I think the amount of money would be enourmous. ( sure it depends on the amount of money invested and lost by a costumer.)


Contracts are contracts! Please, don't forget this.
I love SL but I hate this ongoing toward costumers. As far as I see LL will have to live with grandfathed contracts and allready existing contracts. New OS Sim owner may be charged more, no question, but not already existing ones.

One last thing: There must be a reason for this out of any question ongoing. LL, what is going on. Have you got pressure from the banks ( finacial crises)? What is the real reason behind this.? There must be a calculable szenario, if a company is going that far!

[5:01] Jack Linden: okay so here is a question; do you think us pinning prim counts down to say 1500, and limiting script count to 250, would be acceptable if the price stayed as it now? I'm not suggesting this is possible, but I'm interested in your opinions.

I think that's a great start. But i would take it further, and drop the prims to 900, and price to $50 a month. Bring back the requirement to purchase 4 at a time if need be, and to have them anchored to full prims sims as well. Fine. Just please oh please stop pretending you had no idea people would use OSs as they are now. It's SOOO insulting.

Prims, script-limits, and avatar caps DON'T limit the resources a simulator can use. An open-space sim should be limited to 25% of a processors speed, 1/16th of the machine's RAM, 1/16th of its bandwidth. Tweaking prim-counts will do sweet FA, LL needs to properly limit a simulator's hardware resource usage, the fact that they haven't and never did is their fault, not ours.

This is a great discussion, because it focuses on the stated actual problem.

The best solution is to regulate usage. Then those who leave the OS sims will be those who are misusing them, not the appropriate users. Raising the price does just the opposite - it over prices them for the light-duty users, and encourages everyone to use them even more (e.g. more renters) to get their money's worth.

What kind of high-tech business that KNOWS that its selling something that was never sold before, sells an untested product to the masses without first testing it at all levels and for a while?

What kind of business does the above, notices the mistake, and the first thing it does is increase the prices? Why should the consumer PAY for their bad business?

Is it a good excuse to say over and over again "Oh we're sorry but this was never sold before, so we run the business poorly and excuse ourselves because it's something it was never DONE before?"

Nobody ever "sold OpemSIMs before", NO, but I think a LOT of people have "run business before", YES? Stop it Linden Labs. It's a bad vibe.

Again why has LL doubled the prims then at a later stage Jack is *suggesting* dropping them to 1500 is somehow a possible and fair decision.

Limiting Avatar limits to 20 and script usage to 2ms is fine and understandable but please dont remove prims also offering an alternative SIM rather than modifying the existing SIMs is not a solution here as it will still destroy many thousands of hours of work.

I can tell we are going to suffer for LL's poor decisions and short sightedness / incompetence no matter what the final outcome.

Prims are not the problem, so they could well stay at their current level. The main problem, if there is any, are scripts and avatars. So limit the maximum number of avatars to somewhere between 10 and 20, and put a limit on script usage. Or even better, as Haravikk suggests limit the resources that can be used.

Anyway, it does not matter what idea's we come up with, they will go on with their new pricing I guess. Maybe free conversion back, though most estates are in the middle of abandoning or converting already. But Open Sims as we know them, are going down the drain. As I said in another topic, this has been the best fundraiser for new hardware ever: 4000 dollar for each server with 16 open sims... go figure. Soon a new mainland continent will rise, paid for by our valued estate owners. For 100k you can have your own 1024 m2 parcel too!

People, you don't need to place "hard limit" on the SIM configuration, because the hardware usage doesn't depends by a precise factor: i can lag a sim using 100 avs, but i can lag it using 1 av but 10000 scripts, while i can lag it without using any av or script by hi-res texture everywhere... so limiting a SIM to 20 avs and 250 script is NOT the solution! Oh well it's not a solution that any competent IT engineer would take in consideration.
I've tried to axplain a technical solution here (post n.10):

http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/10/29/update-regarding-the-openspaces-announcement/

They have the possibility to load balance and allocate resource per virtual machine (a SIM is a running software on a virtual machine), so you can have a SIM than cannot effect other simulators on the same server because it has a precise amount of CPU power and bandwidth allocated (that can be fixed or dynamic).

The easy solution (fixed allocated resources):

- You assign to each virtual machine the 6.67% of the total server power. It means that doesn't count if you use these resources because of many avatars on the sim, or many scripts, you can't simply use more than 6.67% of the server resources, when you "hit" that max your sim will lag.. and it will lag ALONE (without affecting any other sim on the same server);

The smart solution (dynamic allocated resources):

- You assign the 6.67% of server resource to each virtual machine (SIM) but you don't force it until it is really needed. How it works: in a precise moment there would be a single simulator using the 50% of the total server resources, because the other SIM's on the same server doesn't need "their" power (ie: empty simulators... etc.), *BUT* whenever they ask to have their allocated resources, that 50% is throttled back to share the resources. Some examples on a server running 16 Open Spaces:

- 1 is using 50% because it needs to;
- 15 are using the remaining 50% because they doesn't need more;

- 1 is using 25% because it needs;
- 1 is using 25% because it needs;
- 15 are using the remaining 50% because they doesn't need more;

...and in a "perfect" scenario (when all the simulators are asking for their power):

- 16 are using 6.67% of the total server power, and who's smart to not exceed it will not lag, who is "abusing" of their allocated power will lag (but alone) because he cannot use more than that 6.67%.

Sorry about my english... i'm not sure if it's completely "clear".

Why isn´t it possible to set up the CPU usage dynamcly?

e.g. if there is a large load on Scripts the possible number of agents goes down and vice versa! Automatic and dynamic!

So the overall load of the a OS always stays the same and is under controle!

Every simple shared Webserver in the Internat can do something like that!

Give this man a job at LL plzkty

Because you don't need to manage with the server daemon, while you can apply the limits to total resources used without care at all if you are using them for avatar or for the scripts. So you have a max of 6.67% ..if you wanna use more and there's enough space (in power) on the server u'll be lucky and you can use more.. but whenever the other SIM are using their allocated resources, you can't exceed your limit and you are "forced" to use it (so if you exceed.. you will lag). It's really more easy to apply than to exaplain... it's the basics of virtual servers / shared resources / load balancing.

So you may ask: "if it's so easy, why they doesn't uses it?" ...well the reason may be different, in our case (OpenSpace) i think they won't/need to use it, because the problem isn't really the performance, it is just an excuse to try to justify a price hike: you can actually read the truth in the recent Jack's words (whenever they aren't completely clear): the reason isn't the abuse, but the usage; we found these OS very usefull, Linden Lab so decided that they worth more than $75 and fixed a new price. So it is more a "commercial" reason than a technical reason. But it seems they didn't considered the fact that not anyone of us are using these sims for commercial purposes: many of us are using it as "homes", to have a peaceful piece of land to "dream", nor to make money.
So it doesn't really count if you are using 3000 prims or 1750... it counts the "destination" (usage) of these sims.
But apart these political reason, a load balancing and a resource allocator would help anyway in these rare case where a single owner is really abusing of resources: he will continue to abuse, but he will "die" alone without affecting me on the same server.

PS: for who's proposing me to have a work at LL (lol), first i can't do it because it would be conflictual with my RL job; second i resigned yesterday as a "Mole" (not really working *with* LL but i were working *for* them, like many other good ppl) because i've lost my initial tought of were my effort were aimed (i wanted to improve other residents experience; not make more money) ...so i would never work for a company that i don't trust (it's my opinion) at 110%... i know it sounds pathetic, but until some weeks ago i were still enjoing fun on Second Life, while now i must (second)live waiting that they may decide to increase my (main) SIM fees to $500 and i've to abandon everything (because i think that paying $500 + the openspace + mainland + VAT into this is a way too much for me), anything i've built, and any "dream" i had initially.

The full discussion is here:

http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/10/jack-jacks-the.html

Prims are part of the problem. Even if they're not as much of a technical problem as it seems (and if that's the case, LL should consider increasing prim limits on ALL sims), but more they're a social problem, because they make the openspace more attractive for people who are likely to use it for more than "light use".

Scripts shouldn't be a major problem. The sim software has code to totally choke scripts down to keep them from having a big impact on the sim, and has had that code in place an working for something like a year. Lowering the available script time on an OpenSpace should be easy and shouldn't have that great an impact.

Avatars are the big problem. I proposed in Jira that avatars be limited to 10 per OpenSpace and got totally upbraided by some owners who wanted to held events (like boat races) on them. I guess I should have pushed harder.

Sorry.

I've written webservers, and worked on and contributed code to popular open source webservers.

There's nothing "simple" about what they do for load balancing.

The code to do that kind of thing has taken 10-15 years, and the work of thousands of open source developers, to get it to the point where it's reliable and stable.

The way I feel, you can push as long as you want, but they will do as they want anyway.
Avatars indeed are the biggest problem regarding the use of resources, though not every avatar the same way. And to you and me it is quite sensible that a sim of 1/4 capacity, should have a 10-15 limit, but apparently not to LL.
Anyway, resource balancing seems the best solution. Load can be caused by prims (sculptmaps for example that have to load), excessive textures (1020 textures on a vendor for example...), bad written scripts, and avatars. Resource balancing fights them all

Argent is correct, the prim increas is a factor that contribute to make these OS attractive (and with a wider utilization), it's not the only one indeed: price, possibility to buy just one, placing everywhere on the map... each of these playied a role to make em a "success".
Anyway putting hard limits there, as i mentioned above, isn't really the proper solution, because it's a waste of resources: you need to put really low limit in the envetuality that only of of these would maximize the resource usage; because you never know from the start if you gonna lag because of the scripts or because of the avatars or because of the textures etc. So someone can live perfectly with 40 avatars on an openspace because it doesn't use any script; while on the other side someone else can have 1000 scripts running because he's alone, and so on... place a limit on both (and on the rest) would only means that you'll have none of them using the resources in the expected way, none would be happy, and LL will end having a server used by half of its potential. So the "limit" must be unlinked by the factor, it must be a resource limit (all together), not a feature limit.