What are your guy's idea of an ideal sim population balance?

I have been suffering from major game lag lately, which I suspect is from too many resident sims. Not as in FPS drops, its more like sims take way long to do anything. It takes forever for any of my selectable sims to do the most basic actions, like walk into another room or leave the house to go to work (and no, Relativity isn't currently on in my town). Right now I have over 100 YA residents and somewhere between 75-100 adult residents; the other demographics are not nearly as large, but they're somewhere between 25-50 sims each (I'll post exact demographics stats once I reload my game). I haven't monitored pet demographics yet. I haven't loaded up Oasis Landing, The University, or any of the WA worlds yet, so I don't know if doing so would affect my population demographics.

I have a fairly hardy computer with a dedicated graphics card and decent memory, but over 100 YAs seems to be the limit for a world that is actually playable. The lag is so bad that by the time my sim actually makes it to work, work is already over for the day! I don't believe door traffic is an issue with the rabbit holes my sims hold careers in, but with some other rabbit holes (like the theater, and the school of course) people wait outside for almost half a day before they get inside, causing mass passing out, pants wetting, and the usual low motives stuff.

I'm doing a test run with the bare minimum of my mods installed to see if my severe lag issues have cleared up. I have almost all of the NRAAS modules (save for a few) and Awesome installed. I did a "Reset Everything" with MasterController when I played earlier, but that didn't seem to fix the major lag issues (it did clear up multiple script errors relating to lighting fixtures, oddly enough though).
<hr />
So anyways, back to my point. What population demographics do you guys have that makes the game playable but still interesting? Do you let immigration/emmigration occur? How do your pet demographics fair? I'm just curious what other players' ideals are.

Hi kittykat999 - RE your lag: See if the <a href="http://nraas.wikispaces.com/Tips+For+Be ... ance">Tips For Better Game Performance</a> helps you out. It has suggestions and identifies tools to help clean and keep your game healthy.

Thing is, I've tried a good number of these things before. I've merged tons of package files and try to do game-related cleanups frequently. Most lag issues I've had in the past have purely been framerate drops (the camera moving jaggedly, freezing, sims moving jerkily, etc); this lag is lag in the sims actually doing things. When the sims actually DO move, they move pretty darn fluidly; its just getting them to move that's a struggle.
The only other thing I COULD do is maybe do some system cleanups (registry clean, duplicate file check, etc), but from past experience those processes tend to take a very long time to do on a 2TB system.

OK you might want to give us your system specs, RAM, PC, Graphics Card, etc. "Fairly hardy computer" does not give much to go by.
Poplation demographics will vary among players depending upon their systems and game play style. I think you might be best to focus on your system capabilities and where you are with your games. Have you played worlds so long they have become bloated? Are you experiencing lag in all your worlds?

Forgot to ask: what EP's/SP's do you have installed?

I only really seem to be having issues in worlds with high populations. A couple of months ago I had a file going in Isla Paradiso (the fixed version, mind you) with the regular starting population + a couple of extra households, and it seemed to operate with few issues (there was some issues with the taxi boats not moving unless I had my camera focused on them, and the usual door traffic issues, but that's basically it).

The file I'm having issues on is only about a sim-week old. I used one of Awesome Mods's cheats to annihilate everyone in Sunset Valley before I started playing any families. Memories are currently turned off. Population standings are: 43 households, 207 residents, 71 service, 0 homeless, and 0 tourists. Lifespan is currently set for "long".

I was having similar lag issues in multiple custom worlds I was using with an almost identical population size, but I brushed that off with maybe the world was too big or there was some bad routing areas somewhere in the world causing issues.

I haven't installed any new CC or mods in quite awhile.

My system specs are as follows:
Processor: Intel(R) Core i7-6500U CPU @ 2.50 GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.59 GHz
Installed RAM: 12.0 GB (11.9 GB usable), specifically 12288MB RAM (12152MB RAM useable)

The computer itself is 1 1/2 years old.
I have a dedicated graphics card that is already set to run when I play the Sims 3.
My regular card is an Intel(R) HD Graphics 520. Its memory specs are:
Display Memory: 6203 MB
Dedicated Memory: 128 MB
Shared Memory: 6075 MB

My dedicated card is an NVIDIA GeForce 940MX. Its memory specs are:
Display Memory: 8072 MB
Dedicated Memory: 1996 MB
Shared Memory: 6075 MB

I think that's all the specs you need. Lemme know if I forgot to mention something.

It just occured to me: I'm pretty sure Sims 3 RAM usage is limited to 2GB by default, and I haven't adjusted the maximum on my computer yet. Could the issue be RAM related?

I have all EPs installed, and for SPs I only have Sweet Treats and Town Life.

On a side note the lag issue isn't just limited to sim actions, I've also noticed that the day/night cycle seems to be rather delayed. It will occasionally still be light outside at a time when it is supposed to be dark (like I've had it where it just reaches twilight around 11pm-12am), and vice versa. I am using default EA seasons settings and default Tempest settings.

Thanks for the detail. This will be very useful for others to step in and advise. Your system specs look adequate enough but lets wait for someone with more system knowledge to take a look. The games RAM usage is around 3.7GB. I don't want to make any assumptions resulting in creating more problems so will hold off for one of our other members to jump in here.