Is your KSP load crashing with lots of mods? Try Active Texture Management

[michaelhester07]

Active Texture Management

I don't think I've ever requested a sticky before but this one probably needs a sticky.

I see so many threads created about modded KSP installs crashing on startup with 32 bit KSP. The problem is that with lots of mods comes lots of memory consumption. KSP pre-loads all textures at startup and keeps them loaded throughout the game. This is probably done to speed up load times for when you encounter ships in the persistent environment.

The problem with this strategy is that Squad only expects to load their assets and only tested for their assets. They expect KSP to run with a 2gb footprint with some margin for in game memory changes.. When you start adding mods to your KSP that add parts you increase the memory footprint. If you have few mods you'll edge close to the 3.5gb hard limit for memory used by KSP before it crashes. That limit is imposed by the 32bit Unity engine. This means your KSP may suddenly crash mid game for no apparent reason. If you have a lot of mods then you'll break that limit before loading finishes. In both cases you'll see a small window saying KSP crashed when you alt-tab out of it. If you were to read the log file you'd find right before the crash dump there was an error for running out of memory.

So far the best way I've found to help reduce that footprint is Active Texture Management, which I linked above. If you have a lot of mods installed and have frequent crashes on startup or in game I suggest that you get this mod. It will put the textures on your video card buffer and save at least 40% of the memory consumed by KSP normally.

To a smooth and stable modded experience

[Mystique]

It's a great mod, though after last game&mod's update I had to disable it - it actually uses more memory when enabled, perhaps due to some bugs or mod conflict (most likely with Texture Replacer), so use it carefully.