The original change from supporting 5 simultaneous users to only 2 was hard for me to accept. I liked the ability to run several users at once, and never seemed to encounter any problems that seemed, to me at least, to be related to it. So I soon reverted the change on my personal build and continued to run more that 2 users at once. Without any factual basis to support it, I adopted a personal policy of always completely closing each instance before starting the next. As I say, I have no real reason to believe that made any real difference, but I didn't seem to encounter any problems with this method of operation. And thus I continued to run this way until about the beginning of this year. At that time I bought a new computer that was supposed to be a lot more powerful than my previous one, so I decided to kick it up another notch and increased the number of simultaneous users from 5 to 6. This also seemed to work fine and is the way I've operated for most of this year.
My typical day is to start up a batch of 6 chars and let them run to completion as I wander off and do other things. At some point, I come back and clean things up, restarting any that chars that stopped running for whatever reason, rinse, lather, and repeat. This works fine for my needs and I'd like to see mafia restored to actually officially supporting more than 2 simultaneous users. But as I say, this seems to meet my needs and I can continue running my local build if the mafia devs feel this is not the way to go.
For the record, I'm retired and basically have no life. After starting to play KoL in Dec. 2005, I soon had what seemed to be the standard configuration of mulits at that time: 1 softcore, 1 hardcore, and 1 hardcore oxy. I played that way for some time, then one manic day I decided I wanted a char of each class and proceeded to create 6 new multis in one day. That went ok for a while, but then things started bogging down and I looked for a way to speed things up. That was when I discovered mafia and start using it. It was a lot of fun and a way to dabble in some programming which I missed after retiring. Mainly ASH programming, but some poking around at the mafia innards and thus java. Since them, I've resisted to urge to create any more chars, but have adopted a few orphans when friends who had a character with some some nice, but untradable items like familiars and bound items of the month, decided to quit the game.