Too many entities & frequent server crashes.

We thought we knew what we were doing, and we believe we put together a wonderful bunch of (mostly compatible) mods. 

Combining High Efficiency Turrets & Weapon Engineering allowed me to create these wonderful Predator Canons with continuous Burst Fire and more than an 80km range.  When getting into fights with lots of ships, lots of turrets and lots of weapon fire were server hangs/crashes that we believe stems from too many entities (many ships, many turrets, many weapon projectiles, many loots).  Progressively, these crashes are taking place more and more rapidly, suggesting that the number of actively simulated entities isn't getting scrubbed, or, that there is such a concentration of entities in the 5 online sectors per player allowed that the server just can't cope. 

Short of scrapping the server, we've come up with a couple of options:
Players in the Core must use "hitscan weapons" only.  (Lasers, railguns, other things that don't generate projectiles that fly through space.)
We're trying to figure out how we can clear the server's cache of... abandoned entites; be they small wreckages (less than 15 blocks), weapon projectiles that were fired but never reached their destination when the server last crashed. 

Is there a way for admins to clean up such a server?
Our server never gave players any server load warnings. 
If we scrap the unstable server, we will not make the same mistakes - we endeavor to make entirely new mistakes! 
 

It'd be nice to see a response to this as we are having the same problem on our server.  After so many battles and so much loot and ship wreckages in a few sectors, the game crashes.  There is obviously a memory issue here whether it is a leak or just simply too much for the server to handle.  many of the error messages seem to be centered around saving a sector.

 

The game is an absolutely great concept, but with a horrible execution with it's stability.  If I have more than two ships in a single sector and then launch fighters, the server lags out and usually crashes.  It's not like the server is loaded.  Avorion is the only thing running and it is an 8 core, 8 thread processor and 32 GB of ram.  I even have a 4GB video card in it. 

 

My server and it's players are abandoning Avorion because it just can't keep up with even the simplest multiplayer game play.  Too bad,  as I said, it was a great concept.  Just a really shitty execution.