Second Life has too many servers, in danger of eating Internet (Broken Toys.)

The "3 users per server" bit is particularly surprising. It sounds, though, like that's comparing apples and oranges. The servers are responsible for bits of land, which -- in SL -- can be pretty complicated beasts. Since the game now charges for land use, not for character use, it actually makes some kind of sense to have your servers scale with land. It's the actual revenue stream, after all.

Still -- 2,579 servers seems crazy big for an environment that's still essentially a novelty until it gets a substantial UI revamp.