Sims 3 Crashed because of Memory. Now I can't load

[Reliant]

I have a hefty 4-core CPU & Graphics card. 8 Gigs of RAM (I think Sims 3 caps at 4 gigs anyway)

I am playing on Union Cove with a fairly fresh family that's still on its 1st generation.

I have primarily NRAAS mods designed for resolving bugs: MasterController, Overwatch, Consigner, DebugEnabler, ErrorTrap, OnceRead, Saver, Traveler

I have gone through the normal steps for clearing out the caches. I cleaned out DCBackup (except for ccmerged), removed the *Cache.package from the base folder. I tried cleaning out WorldCaches (Union Cove is 1Gb), but that caused my save to fail to load, so I restored that one. My most recent successful save is 132 Megs, which is really small. I have older towns that have grown beyond 1 gig in size. It does take 3 minutes to save though.

I did have the NRAAS mod Story Progression, which I believed caused this problem. I have removed it, but I haven't been able to figure out how to clean up the town beyond what Overwatch does. I've been getting 3AM clean-up notices of up to 150 cars & 75 stuck sims.

The current population of Union Cove was somewhere around 90-150, I forget.

Last night, I ran my nightly save at 5am (simtime) in a new slot (5 slots that alternate) and it saved fine. I went into CAS to change the outfit of 1 sim. Upon exiting, the game crashed and I went to sleep. While writing this post, I tried to load my save to see what the population is at, and none of my saves (including an old save made on Day 1) for that world will load.  I get an immediate "A serius error has occured while loading '[Save file]'. It is strongly recommended that you restart the application.". The only thing I did since last night was install the Crash Analyzer to confirm the cause. I wasn't even aware of this new problem until I had reached this paragraph in writing this post. The only thing different was that instead of crashing while saving, it crashed while leaving CAS.

I noticed my base folder cache files were only 1kb, so thinking they might have gotten corrupted, I have tried deleting them again to no effect. I also tried cleaning the World Cache to see if there would be a change. Last time, the game spent several minutes trying to load, and this time it insta-failed.

While searching for solutions, I was reminded of something I did differently last night. I had disabled Avast for 1 hour. I tried disabling it again, no change.

I also tried starting a new town based on Union Cove, same error, so the Union Cove Seasons.world must have gotten corrupted. Mine is 132,669,097 bytes

If I create a backup of my save, uninstall & reinstall Union Cove, then restore my saves, is this considered safe?

[SimAd]

It should be safe, but if you get that error repeatedly it's wise to reboot the computer before trying again. Even if you want to try another save after getting the error again.

[Reliant]

It should be safe, but if you get that error repeatedly it's wise to reboot the computer before trying again. Even if you want to try another save after getting the error again.

Reinstalling UC has allowed my save game to load. World Cache immediately following load is at 225 Megs. Now that it's loading, I can focus on the original reason I was writing the post before discovering I couldn't load it: Trimming it down in memory usage because of suspected bloat.

Saving took 4 minutes, so I'm worried I might still be running close to the memory limit.

Union Cove has 132 residents (97 households). What are the normal demographics for a large sized world?

I've lowered some of my texture details to see if that frees up more memory for the world itself.

[SimAd]

Unfortunately none of the file sizes have any good correlation to the amount of memory your game uses.

Best is to call up the Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del, select Task Manager), go to the Processes tab, sort by Commit Size (tick the "header"), and look at what it says there for the TS3W.exe process.

On your system, as long as it's less than roughly 3,000,000 K you're in the clear.

Note that this figure can swing wildly depending on whether you are in Map View, or have a lot on screen with a lot of textures etc.

[Reliant]

Unfortunately none of the file sizes have any good correlation to the amount of memory your game uses.

Best is to call up the Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del, select Task Manager), go to the Processes tab, sort by Commit Size (tick the "header"), and look at what it says there for the TS3W.exe process.

On your system, as long as it's less than roughly 3,000,000 K you're in the clear.

Note that this figure can swing wildly depending on whether you are in Map View, or have a lot on screen with a lot of textures etc.

I hadn't checked the memory usage before I lowered the details settings, and when I had checked after making those changes Sims 3 was running at around 2-2.4Gb of memory

Right now I'm running some tests against freshly created worlds to see how my save time compares and if I'm really suffering from bloat. My current Union Cove takes 3 minutes to save. A freshly created town took 3:30 for the 1st save and 2:50 to save the 2nd time., so I'm starting to feel confident that I won't be having any issues in the short now that I've lowered the texture detail.

Thanks for all the help and good advice SimAd