Not in a hurry, but does anybody wanna share some good optimization practices?

This isn't a programming-related issue, but if someone can suggest me a way of optimizing my particle effects through either Unity settings or custom scripts, without making them look so so different, that'd be helpful for me in the future. Thank you.

I may or may not need help with this in a bit... Anyone have some good performance practices, in terms of rendering? In my situation here I'm mostly concerned with the 3D particles and lighting.

If there's a C# method or function I can use kill off unnecessary particles and effects, or maybe some setting I can change in Unity, that would be helpful. (apart from the quality settings, didn't find anything related to lights or particles in there).

I only recently started on it, there's only a few basic objects in the scene I'm working on right now. In other words, this scene is still fairly basic, yet the moment I have more than 40 spheres lit up on screen at a time it has a total meltdown trying to keep up.

The particles and lighting around the player character, when in HD, will cause large lagspikes. I understand this is a hardware issue, but I still think it's pathetic that I barely have worked on the game's graphics lately and now I get this kind pf performance. AKA, barely developed graphics + poor performance = horrible presentation.

The performance can really impact my gameplay, especially since late in development I plan to add multiplayer if possible. Whenever it starts doing this, it always causes severe input lag with it. In multiplayer the rest of the game would just go on without you for every late/missed frame you get, giving other players a better chance. To make matters worse, I plan to make this effect happen during more intense moments, indicating a Combo-induced buff., like if you do a certain number of damage to several players, etc. Imagine trying to take on 5 other players at once and just when you're doing really good the speed slows to a crawl and they defeat you for no reason other than you don't have a good PC to play on. It sucks. I've been there before.

An average, low-end prebuilt PC would be probably worse than this. Meaning those players are going to get what I'm assuming will be around 7 to 18 FPS whenever this effect pops up: (don't mind the sloppy placeholder sprite.)

I can't tell for sure how bad an average low-end GPU would perform. I'd have to wait to find my old computer somewhere, from some years ago.

Particle setup explained but it has too much detail

What it's doing is spawning about 500 particles per second and 400 per distance each one travels. The max is 1000. 1000 spheres may sound extreme, but I added a trigger that made sure the particles are deleted once they go outside the particle collider, which only covers a little bit more space than the player. Each particle has a high velocity going outward.
This means that within 1 or 2 frames of it spawning, it vanishes. Period. So there are really no more than a couple dozens onscreen at a time.

Sadly since there are a ton of spheres placed on top of each other, it ends up rendering several polygons more than what is needed. I might write a script to clear extra particles that are overlapping where they shouldn't, and reduce the number that can exist in a small area at the center.

Sorry for the huge post. Feel free to ask questions if you didn't understand. I'll be mostly busy this weekend...