4 reasons why not to use public standalone for opensim.

First off just like to thank by buddy Tim from Zetamex with doing this list.
This list is for public use of standalones.

1. Strain of having grid services and region load on the same instance.
2. OpenSim's HTTP service can barely handle the requests it has now, forcing opensim to serve both as a standalone just makes things worse.
3. Standalones are not able to contain large traffic, and often need restarting.
4. Limited to just a few regions that the computer can handle‏.

These 4 reasons are why Tim doesn't offer standalones and why i always suggest not using it as a public grid.
I do use a standalone with 2 sims for personal use and testings but i made it so no one else can get on which is fine for just testing scripts but standalone for others to visit and use is very bad.
I lag with just 2 standalone sims on a 12GB ram, 3.1GHZ quad core cpu, but of course i load balance my 2 sims when i boot it up. Most of the time its just unused files on my 1TB hard drive. But I will be converting my standalone to Robust in a few weeks so I don't lag as much as I do right now with it being standalone.

I have seen people use standalones as a public grid and usually the person who made the grid would put up like 10 to 100 sims then complain on social media that they are lagging. Well gee i wonder why. You're using a standalone to host 10 to 100 sims.

Lets break it down to simple terms.

Opensim.exe can only mostly handle sim activity like walking, local chat talking, rezzing, prim settings, physics, scripts, lighting, terraforming, and parcel's. Thats it. You then make the program have to handle assets, inventory, IM's, groups, search, currency, profiles, and logins / logouts its gonna choke and cause lag, even if you have just 1 or 2 sims, Opensim.exe will choke.

This is why experienced grid admins like me, Tim and afew others always strongly suggest opening a grid with Robust.exe cuz that can handle assets, inventory, IM's, groups, search, currency, profiles, and logins / logouts allowing Opensim.exe to just handle all the actual region stuff. Granted Opensim.exe still has to do alot and still chokes and lags when in Robust mode but its less compared to when its in Standalone mode because it doesn't have to deal with everything else that Robust can do.

Also with Robust, you can get as many servers you can afford and host tons of sims across those servers that can connect to your one robust server acting as 1 grid. That's how Linden Labs does it with Second Life, and it's how other big grids like InWorlds, 3rd Rock Grid and Metro does it.
With Standalone, you can only have 1 server hosting everything off of 1 Opensim.exe

So next time you want to boot up a standalone, please remember this blog and go with Robust.