Skyrim freezing after loading and save/autosave

[BirgitteSilverbow]

deleted

Edited March 25, 2013 by BirgitteSilverbow

[BirgitteSilverbow]

http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL1225/6179662/21275223/406090547.jpg

 

loading in and crashing

 

http://pic20.picturetrail.com/VOL1225/6179662/21275223/406089970.jpg

 

Playing for a good while, then loading and infinite load

Edited March 25, 2013 by BirgitteSilverbow

[HiFiSi]

I have been having this same problem. From what I can see, it is caused when there is a large increase in RAM usage during loading. For instance, if I'm in an interior cell and the game is only using 600mb of RAM, then I use an exit door to an exterior cell where it may use like 1800mb of RAM, it will freeze up during loading. When I uninstall the SkyrimHD and official high res textures, the load freezing never happens because the game is using much less RAM.

[finndo77]

I have found (by using two monitors and using windows task manager on the second screen while playing) Skyrim tends to load up around 370MB of RAM to get to the title screen (I have the logo video disabled), now if you try to load a save game that takes the total Working set RAM usage OVER 1.8GB there is a good chance it will fail to load (really good if you use more than 20 mods), I have around 120 mods installed (I had to cut down to reduce the number of game crashes to a playable amount, used to be around 370 mods). On average when I play an interior save game will load up between 600MB and 1.2GB of used working set RAM for TESV.exe, an exterior cell will load up between 1.6GB and 2.4GB of working set RAM usage. 80% of the time if the current RAM usage is over 2GB when I am playing, then I know that my save most likely won't load.

WORKAROUND:

load an interior save game (does not matter how old as far as I can tell, but the same character helps), then load the save you really want to play. This works 100% of the time for me when I have loading screen hangs (except when CTD during save, that might actually be a corrupted save file and I have had 4 of those in 420 hours of game play in Skyrim)

No BS, I have to do this about 20 times every time I try to play Skyrim as I CTD about once every 15-30 minutes while playing. I think having too much in your inventory has an affect on this as well, so try dumping unneeded items in a chest in your home if you are not going to sell them, additionally I constantly use the console to "disable" corpses, trying to keep the save file size down. After 420 hours of game play (180 with the same character) my saves are only just under 16MB each.

[leewells]

 

Are you seriously telling me that I need to buy a 10k HDD or go solid state to play this game?

 

 

No, I have a SSD drive, actually I have 2 SSD drives with SATA3 running in a raid striping (Raid0) configuration which is twice as fast as one SSD and I STILL have this issue and have had it since installing Skyrim and a few mods once my save file hits 12Mb (after 20+ hours of play)

 

I think the issue has a lot to do with autosave and not the loading screen itself. From what I can see in the Papyrus logs, many follower scripts fire off just after you fast-travel and then when you save at the same time seems to push the game past its response budgets. This means it just stops processing as it figures it has hit a critical error.

 

One thing that can help is to clean your saves. Take all your old saves and move them somewhere else besides the save folder. This seems to help.

[jaime74]

I think the issue has a lot to do with autosave and not the loading screen itself. From what I can see in the Papyrus logs, many follower scripts fire off just after you fast-travel and then when you save at the same time seems to push the game past its response budgets. This means it just stops processing as it figures it has hit a critical error.

Thanks, leewells! This sounds like a reasonable explanation for this common issue.

If it should be true, one could take into consideration to propagate a rule of best practice for modders (something like: "try not to add too many on-autosave scripts to minimize the risk of freezing loading screens").

 

One thing that can help is to clean your saves. Take all your old saves and move them somewhere else besides the save folder. This seems to help.

That's a bit unclear to me: Why should the number of older saves in the savegame folder influence the amount of scripts being run in game?

The only thing I've experienced is that a huge number of savegame files can slow down the game's main menu.