technique to avoid crash due to insufficient memory

[gwgardner]

I have 4 gig memory, and Train Simulator has always been very stable for me when route editing. However today I've been doing a lot of painting of ballast beneath tracks, and twice TS2017 has crashed on me due to 'no more memory.' So basically I need to save more often, and exit the sim I guess, and restart.

To remind myself to do that before another crash, as I proceed painting ballast, I've started keeping 'task monitor' open, as in the screenshot, so I can see current memory usage.

Maybe there are other ways to keep track of this? Let me know please.

[buzz456]

I just hit F2 real often so that if the game crashes the stuff is mostly saved. The other thing I do is use Iobit Advanced System care which has a monitor that you can "clean ram" Doing this every few minutes seems to cut crashing down almost completely when doing terrain painting of any kind.

[JerryC]

I wonder if a "memory extender" program, such as CS Explorer would help. I used to have tons of crashes when building locomotives with 3DCrafter. The problem wasn't that memory space was filling up, but that 3DC had a built in 1GB memory space usage limit. Using a third party program that could copy and write to the application .exe, I could extend 3DC memory usage to 2GB, which elminated most (but not all) of the crashes.

[mrennie]

I use this app to extend 3DCrafter to use up to 4GB RAM. I've used it on all the RW exe files too (and have to remember to do it again every time there's a Steam update to the exes).

http://www.ntcore.com/4gb_patch.php

[artimrj]

I thought this was an nVidia bug?? New drivers seemed to fix it as I was having it happen all the time last year.

[OldProf]

I'll probably be chewed out for stating the obvious, but isn't the best way to extend memory adding more physical memory? And unless I'm mistaken, TS relies on at least two sources of memory, the second residing on the graphics card.

[Alpenfreight]

I'll probably be chewed out for stating the obvious, but isn't the best way to extend memory adding more physical memory? And unless I'm mistaken, TS relies on at least two sources of memory, the second residing on the graphics card.

It's a 32bit Application so it will never use more than 4gigs

[buzz456]

I'll probably be chewed out for stating the obvious, but isn't the best way to extend memory adding more physical memory? And unless I'm mistaken, TS relies on at least two sources of memory, the second residing on the graphics card.

It's a 32bit Application so it will never use more than 4gigs

Yes but if you only have 4 gigs and RW is using most of it then there isn't any left for other things.

[artimrj]

I'll probably be chewed out for stating the obvious, but isn't the best way to extend memory adding more physical memory? And unless I'm mistaken, TS relies on at least two sources of memory, the second residing on the graphics card.

There was a bug in the NVidia driver that leaked memory. If you had the task manager open and looking at mem usage, you could watch it drop as you painted.

[gwgardner]

I'll probably be chewed out for stating the obvious, but isn't the best way to extend memory adding more physical memory? And unless I'm mistaken, TS relies on at least two sources of memory, the second residing on the graphics card.

There was a bug in the NVidia driver that leaked memory. If you had the task manager open and looking at mem usage, you could watch it drop as you painted.

That's exactly what I see. Near my downtown section, I may have 15% mem left, but as I paint, it gradually goes to the mid-90s, at which point I have to get out of edit mode or rush to some un scenicked portion of the route to get mem usage to drop before it crashes.

I've tried upgrading my Nvidia 580 driver, but the installation of the latest Nvidia driver always fails. I've searched the net for reasons why to no avail.

[gwgardner]

It's a 32bit Application so it will never use more than 4gigs

I was about to upgrade my memory, but does this mean that is useless, especially along with a Nvidia driver bug? Or perhaps Windows could use the added memory, while Train Simulator hogs the 4 gig?

[JerryC]

Memory is where your system loads the programs that your computer is using at any given time. This includes TAS programs that are running in the background. Even if Railworks doesn't use it, your system overall would benefit from the increase. It might free up resources for Railworks to use that it is currently sharing with other programs.

And since memory is cheap, then why not get more! I may never need it all, but i've got 32 GB and no worries about ever filling it all up.

[buzz456]

Memory is where your system loads the programs that your computer is using at any given time. This includes TAS programs that are running in the background. Even if Railworks doesn't use it, your system overall would benefit from the increase. It might free up resources for Railworks to use that it is currently sharing with other programs.

And since memory is cheap, then why not get more! I may never need it all, but i've got 32 GB and no worries about ever filling it all up.

What Jerry says. I have 16 GB and love it. It is still possible to crash RW because of it's limits but the added memory makes it a lot less of a problem.