limiting scripts/avatars per parcel to combat lag, especially lag by clubs

If they're small enough they can't be abused, they're not going to have an effect. If someone's having a party that's big enough to have an impact on the sim, they're going to be making a token payment that, divided up among the other users, won't begin to compensate someone who was really inconvenienced.
Doesn't take any of someone's time at all to use libsl to drop a dozen camper bots on someone's land and leave them there, they can do it during the day when the victim's at work... they probably won't notice until they're in the hole for more than their tier. And it's not "random". Griefers pick someone they don't like, for whatever reason.

What 'fines for high traffic' would do is make just about EVERYONE put up access controls on their land, and screw up SL with more red banlines than it is already.
Then it's a less effective version of the quota proposal. This isn't a complex problem, it's one that has been well and truly solved in timeshared systems for over 30 years, and the solution (quotas only enforces in overcommitment) works well. It's how internet access is priced, it's how flat rate phone service is priced, it's how any resource that follows a disk space/cpu time/bandwidth model where almost everyone uses the same amount, many people occasionally need to use a lot more, and there's lots to spare almost all of the time.
In SL you do that by making them buy a proportionate amount of land. If someone wants to use more of the resources of a sim, continuously, then they need to buy more of the sim. That's fair, predictable, safe from abuse, and consistent with what's already there.

I'm with Argent. reinventing stuff from first, abstract principles is what makes SL HARD to scale, manage and improve. Making load-balancing work is such a well-known piece of technology that we should regard imbalanced resource allocation in sims as a bug, not a feature request.

A long time ago, many revisions past, there was actually something of a scheme for balancing script load. You see, back then there was these things, they were called telehubs. When you teleported from one point to another point on the main grid, you ended up at a telehub, and then you had to fly, walk, ride a vehicle the last few hundred meters to the place you were going.

Because most residents seeking entertainment or shopping were unwilling to travel very far from a hub, this had the effect of clustering simulation load around a geographical point. One of the main considerations for a storefront or a casino in 2005 or so was being in easy reach of a hub. Thus by placing the powerful sims at telehubs, followed by the sims surrounding a hub, and radiating out from there, a sort of balance was reached between processing demand and processing supply.


When point to point teleporting came along and hubs removed, such geographic focus was lost. The problem now is that high load builds can occur anywhere, and often in simulators that are unprepared to deal with the load. Places like Calleta come to mind

The solution in my eyes is to abstract processing from geography, such that process scheduling happens grid-wide rather than simulator wide. Unfortunately I don't think the SL architecture supports this.

No it doesn't, but it could. It's not even hard, D&D Online aready has a model of distributed world load. Basicaly clump all the low-activity sims onto one group of server blades and move high load sims to less crowded blades or even to dedicated blades such that the power is where it needs to be.

Unfortunately, the grid would have to go down for a very long time for them to change the architecture to do that (and I'm not even talking about writing the code, this would just be the "set up the servers, load the new server code, and bring it back up".