Quantity of Scripts

Please re-direct me to a more appropriate forum, I genuinely seek an answer to this question.

The "facts" I am working off of are:
- A mainland sim is 65536 m2
- "Free Land" or "Land for the Landless" is 512m2

Therefore, there would be 128 parcels of "Free Land" within in mainland sim, if every bit of it was utilized. I am disregarding land within this hypotheical sim reserved for Linden use, etc.

On numerous occasions, most notably after a sim crash has been reported which affected me directly, I've been told by more than one Linden that really there is nothing they can do, since the script load in the sim effected by the crash is intolerably high. At one point there were 890 active scripts, at another 817, and another 787, about 10 minutes after a crash. The "nothing they can do" response was directly related to me asking if the sim crash could be related to the scripted items and linked un-scripted prims that had de-linked of their own accord after the crash.

I must ask, and yes, I understand that a script, dependent on it's design, commands, etc, etc. will have varying levels of effect on sim ecology, how many active scripts can we expect to see a sim run, normally. What is a normal load?

If 128 residents begin life in my hypothetical sim, and, for arguement's sake, the ideal load is 600 active scripts, then each resident is "entitled" to run 4.6875 scripts on their land, before the sim is overloaded. If we raise this to 800, which is the top of the visible meter under Ctrl-Shift-1, then each resident of this hypothetical sim is 6.25.

I am limited by the quantity of land that I own in how many prims it can support at one time. Frankly, I am not running 800 scripts on my estate, or 600 for that matter, or even close. I'm a "prim-nazi" on bulding, though I am still learning shortcuts, and I am endeavoring to remain spartan as I can be, replacing sensors with volume detect, etc. to reduce "laggy" scripts, while maintaining an establishment that will draw and hold the attention of traffic. I begin to feel that I am at the mercy of my neighbors, they could crash the sim everyday, or for that matter, I could. It is possible to keep the server / sim bottlenecked to the point that no resident of it can accomplish anything or enjoy any aspect of it, if one person decides to go "script happy". Is there a guideline I missed, is there a "rule of thumb", is there some way I can enjoy building on the mainland without being a victim of script terrorists bring the dil to .12 and the fps to 2. I'd not be so crazy over this, if it did not effect me personally, at least, every 3 days, and often several times during the day. I'm told that there is no way that who ir running what scripts can be determined, and therefor I just should ask my neighbors to tone down their script usage, that they may not be aware of what they are doing. Well, I would assert, that I can't police my neighbors, and there should be a tool to determine if an "individual" is destroying the ecology of a sim.

Thoughts, ideas, am I baying at the moon? Should there be a script cap based on land as there exists one for prims? Should I post this in another, less general forum? Has anyone scripted (lol) a divining rod to help me find the culprits after the sim crashes?

I'm new, possibly quite ignorant of some aspects of what I am even trying to determine, and willing to be educated, so please, throw me a bone

It's actually fairly easy to crash a sim, all you need is a script that rezzes a few physical, interpenetrating concave objects in the same place at the same time.
This isn't something they can fix, it's a problem with the underlying physics engine, which is being upgraded in 1.7 (hallelujah!).
As for ideal script load, I would say zero
See this article on how to troubleshoot lag, or ask your nearest linden to use their magical lag-finder and stop the most intensive tasks.
http://secondlife.com/badgeo/wakka.php?wakka=lag

Howdy! I just made a simple, free little utility script that helps one hunt down scripted objects near your av. IM me inworld if you'd like one. All it does is make a little floating text list of objects within 10m (or whatever distance you mandate) that have active scripts, and another list for passive scripts. There must be some sort of poetic irony using a laggy sensor script to find laggy scripts. Cheers!

Eggy's right; virtually all sim crashes are due to physics problems. In Linden parlance, they're called "deep-thinks", where the sim's physics code tries to figure out how to untangle one object from another. Come SL 1.7, and the Havok 2.x upgrade, this will no longer happen.

While they're unlikely to be related, those script numbers actually do strike me as being a little high. They're probably listeners. Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do about them in your neighbours' scripts, but if you're writing your own, try avoid listeners whenever possible.

Moved to Technical Issues Forum.