Seems like it should be possible to prevent "abuse" (i.e. people loading their OpenSpace sims to an extent that hurts the performance of the others on the same machine) by appropriate fiddling with the operating system or hypervisor or whatever. Talk to the techies, and put in CKRM policies or whatever to ensure that each sim process gets at least its fair share of the CPU. (If it's about disk access or network bandwidth rather than CPU, there are perhaps similar things that would let you do similar things for those.)

If this was done, and someone tried to put more onto an OpenSpace sim than their fair share, they'd get enormous lag (and their neighbors would see little or no impact). And then people would learn just what they can and can't do, rather than having to just sort of guess based on the ambiguous hints and changing prim limits that we have now. This would also help with the fact that OpenSpaces sims are turning out to require more than half of a full sim, rather than the one-quarter that was expected: use OS or hypervisor policies to limit them to one-quarter, and people will then be unable to get more resources than you can provide for what they're paying.

If this has been tried or considered and failed, it would be very interesting to hear about it. It would reassure us that this isn't just a hasty decision, or driven by some unstated purpose.

What am I talking about? Well I built a process control monitor system for oracle databases that collected the key metrics over time on a stable run and then I used six sigma (+/- 3 std deviation math and some rules really) to set control limits. If any measure fell within the rules for trending out of control or gone out of control then it would page me. Saved much unplanned outages from happening. Even detected what turned out to be a dead watch battery on a raid controller board lol.

So if it is possible to take cpu, memory, and network measurements over time for how an open space or regular sim is supposed to run then a monitor can be developed to log sims that have issues. Then someone can have a look and if the sim is being abused in a manner that violates a TOS policy then that region's owner can be dealt with. The key is a clearly written policy that can be enforced backed up by enforcement and a monitor tool set that can make the process of enforcement thorough and cost effective.

Now if the control limits are determined to be incorrect after some period of time then they can be recomputed.

This technique is used in things like EPOS process control monitor systems that ensure the parts in your anti lock brakes work faithfully because they are made within exact tolerances for the entire thermoplastic molding process. So it is not a new thing and has been in use for decades. It is a matter of applying the principles to code for this application.

fixing that would resolve much things..