Yeah, I definitely had some on conduits. As for the packet size/tickrate thing, usually the tickrate skyrockets whenever the server has to calculate a lot of things going on per tick and is generally an internet connection issue as well. I'd think that if the server ran out of memory then it would just freeze calculations per tick or, what's usually happened to me, is it would crash. I'm not as familiar with packet size, but I think that packet size increases if the server has to send out more information. And 30mb of information(which is what it was at one point for me) shouldn't be caused because the server ran out of memory. I think that just because the server runs out of memory, it doesn't mean that it has more information to send to clients. But that's just my opinion on it, I may be wrong.
Also, the packet size was 30mb at one point, as I said, but the packet sizes never got remotely close to that big whenever I had all 8 of us connected to the server. I also run the server on the same computer in which I run the client and I haven't had any connection issues with any of my friends luckily and everything's been running smoothly. I've heard that it's not a good idea to run server and client on the same machine, but I've been doing it for years just fine for 8 people. Maybe it's because I have a 6 core processor so it can run the server calculations on the one or two extra cores and the game on four. But I'm not sure.