The lag problem is probably less caused by the number of players than the fact that with ILCR going on right now, we usually have more players on the ILCR practice servers so that, when the DTAS server has 20 or so players and others are on the additional servers, the server load is around 30 or so. The server should handle 32 players Total, regardless of where they are.
I can lower the numbers if you are running into problems a lot. I am also looking at moving the ILCR servers over to a different server.
Shan