Maximum number of vessels practicable?

[Hotel26]

In my Orbit world [production], I currently have 283 flights in progress.

The quicksaves are taking longer (naturally) and I have to monitor memory (only ~8GB) and restart KSP when memory usage heads toward swap territory (running KSP 1.3.1 on Linux Mint 18.2).

Switching between vessels  seems to be what grows memory -- not so much operating them.

What I'd really like to know is:

1. what's the practical upper limit to # of flights one can have (depending upon memory available)
2. what's the biggest number anyone has running?

I'm simply doing some forward planning here.  Will I eventually need to ration flights?  My (old) motherboard has its max memory already so, clearly, a new computer (yay!) is in the future.

I note that the debris clean-up limit goes up to 10,000: can this mean that 10K vessels is actually a possibility??

Edited October 23, 2018 by Hotel26

[Xd the great]

10000 debris. You are free to attempt. Do note that vessels outside the physics range consume less memory.

[Aeroboi]

I don't know about the greatest experienced. I do think that having debris of 10.000 will noticeably slow down your save. Having a faster computer will run saves with larger amount of vessels better and I think having anywhere close to 10.000 vessels will be a slideshow. I expect anyone boasting the hightest number of vessels in a single savegame also has a lot of game slow downs. I think people stop playing their game when the amount of used vessels becomes that big as it will become to difficult to organize.

[Pecan]

*Sigh* I thought things got a bit 'busy' when I had 70 flights in progress.  3,000+ hours and I'm still a beginner.

No answer for you but good luck!