How to find the right Step Time/Step Space?

OK, should be safe to go lower.
What microstepping?

right now 10k on the X any Y and 2000 on the Z i cut things way back to get things to work without getting all kinds of warnings. i'm not even close to my max levels for the dives and Mesa board.

10K seems a bit much, i have them at 16 or 32 max. With 1:3 or 1:4 reduction.

i can try 6,400 if i have to go that low. but i would like to stay at 10k if i can.

i think my question is more about how things are very specific to the drives and if you are using and if you use the Mesa board when it comes to the step time and step space settings along with the setup and hold times. it seems like if your step times and step space are set to high you limit the number of pulses the system can count? when i get home i will test some more but i was looking to see what you trade off when you adjust these numbers. every action has a reaction sort of deal. I'm just trying to understand it better. it seems to be a topic of confusion.

with my other settings i had to run the servo_period at 2000000 and the most i could get was 400 IMP on the X and Y and 250 on my Z

after playing with these settings all morning i managed to get my Servo_period down to 1800000 and can get 800 IMP on X and Y and 400 IPM on my Z with no warnings coming up.

that's a pretty big improvement by being stubborn and pigheaded like i am i think the 1800000 servo_period is older computer related, it seemed like you could get by as long as it was not over 2000000 from looking at the topic on here.

The setup and hold times have negligible effect on performance
so there no real disadvantage to using larger values (so say 10000 is fine
for almost any system)

The maximum step rate is limited by the step time and step space
values. The maximum step rate is 1/(steptime+stepspace).
This is a simple  physical limitation, that is you cannot issue steps
faster than the  1/(steptime+stepspace) limit without violating the
timing. This is independent of hardware limits.

In general there is no advantage to going beyond say 1/32 microstepping
(6400 steps per turn on a 200 step motor)