Short Question:
How much memory are people typically allocating to run a large number of mods (say ~7 faction mods + Nexerelin +Dynasector)?
Long version:
Prior to 0.8, I remember being able to run a number of simultaneous mods, such as:
Blackrock Drive Yards
Dassault-Mikoyan Engineering
Diable Avionics
Interstellar Imperium
Scy Nation
LazyLib
Ship/Weapon Pack
Underworld
ZZ GraphicsLib
Dynasector
Nexerelin
At one point I had to raise my vmparams Xms and Xmx settings, and have been using 4096 for both for awhile. I've got 8 gigs total ram on my machine at the moment.
I've found in 0.8/0.8.1 either after awhile of playing, or sometimes simply trying to save after starting a new game, it will stop working.
Windows will throw up a window with label "Java(TM) Platform SE binary" and the message:
"Java(TM) Platform SE binary has stopped working
A problem caused the program to stop working correctly. Windows will close the program and notify you if a solution is available."
Similarly, the log file will report nothing as an error, but simply stop at the attempt to save.
338934 [Thread-4] INFO com.fs.starfarer.campaign.save.CampaignGameManager - Saving to ..\\saves/save_Draco_3543890802822850250...
338935 [Thread-4] INFO com.fs.starfarer.campaign.save.CampaignGameManager - Saving stage 1
338962 [Thread-13] INFO com.fs.starfarer.campaign.save.CampaignGameManager - Saving progress: 0.0
The original campaign.xml save file may be fine (and ends approriately with a </memory></CampaignEngine>). However, the campaign.xml.bak file looks to end mid-stream with an open tag and only a fraction of the full file size of the previous save.
This looks like a memory issue based on some of the discussion in this thread.
Is 4 or 5 gigs sufficient for the mods I'm trying to run simultaneously? Even just running 4 faction mods (plus Lazy and ZZ Graphics) is sufficient to run into this problem. Interestingly, just running 2 faction mods seems okay.
If 4 or 5 gigs isn't, I probably need to buy more memory.