Suddenly Using 100% Of Memory When Loading A Map

Been troubleshooting this for atleast the last hour, and I like giving all the context aswell as it helping me keep everything straight, so sorry if this is long. I color-coded a few things, hopefully that helps?
My specs are in my bio.

About 4 hours before this message, I started Beam and loaded into my own map, Douglas Rally 2019. I spent about an hour 30 with the game open in the background, idly download a couple of mods from the repo before finally getting to playing the game. My map is a little unoptimized, but it was stuttering consistently. Every reset or camera change would cause far more of a hiccup than my light Reshade settings ever could. After that, Either I was still sitting where I was before or I had tried loading into Nadeox's Sandy Mountain. By the time the game had begun loading the map while the loading menu was still up, the game started halting insanely hard, to the point where even Ctrl+Alt+Delete would take a couple minutes to even change the screen, enough to be tempted to power off the PC directly. I don't recall, but I may have tried again after the 1st attempt, getting an error message I'll mention later as the PC froze hard enough where I just waited.
I later would find out that Task Manager saw the memory shooting up quickly halfway into loading, the Disk also being at 100%. I do only have around 60GB of space right now, but I've had less space on a mildly worse laptop and it wasn't like this.

Safe Mode.
Don't think I have a place to fit this in the timeline, but there were no issues when running the game in Safe Mode. If it was a hardware issue, Italy would probably show it, but at that time and now, everything loads 100% fine.

Malwarebytes?
Just before all this, I had installed Malwarebytes since I had recently watched virus videos and was curious how well I was doing. After the successful scan finding nothing, I left it. After I believe the first crash and restart, I noticed that Virtual Desktop was complaining about Malwarebytes, so I decided to delete it, I haven't been running with it before anyway. I also updated my Nvidia Drivers from June to current, thinking that may be the issue. I believe that at this point, I tried running the game again and it crashed the same way, this time I was able to get an error message since I didn't restart the pc. I didn't think to take a screenshot until it asked me about support tickets which I've never used and didn't think was necessary yet, but I did find it in the logs thankfully.

I believe that at that time, it also quickly did an integrity check or something related, though it doesn't seem to spit out an error code, so I'm unsure how I got here. Point is, I somehow got"BeamNG 0.33.3.0 0xFFFFFFFF". Searching on the Support Docs, it also referenced Antivirus or 3rd Party Software being an issue. Especially because I assumed MB had targeted the primary 0.33 folder since Safe Mode was fine, I used MalwareBytes's other system to hopefully wipe everything related, but that didn't fix the issue.

Unstable Mods?
Since the error message mentioned that mods could use too much memory, I was worried that was an issue since I had installed some mods inbetween before and after this started. I don't actually think this is related as even deactivating all 170 mods didn't fix this issue. Just incase them just being in your files causes issues somehow, here is all the mods I had downloaded in that time (ignoring the top-left-most mod.)


Missing File?
BeamNG may not have noticed anything during the crash, so I Verified Integrity again using the launcher. This time, it told me there was one file missing: vcruntime140_1.dll. Apparently this is a common issue for apps, but the game usually just won't run. Another reason why I was worried about MB was this, since I did a scan beforehand, although if it wanted to do something, I'm pretty sure it would tell me first. I am curious about how to fix this, but it's less important if this isn't the issue.

So...this is where I'm at now. I couldn't find anyone else with the same issues on the site, and none of the similar questions were answered in the discord, so atleast if this is a simple fix, the solution can help someone else. Hope someone responds, I'm already missing my Roamer ˊᴖˋ

 

Are you able to pull up Task Manager before loading a map? I'd suggest checking if BeamNG is using all of your RAM or if it something else. Also have you tried using Steam to verify the integrity of the game files? Does this only happen on certain maps?

 

I did have Task Manager open while loading the map a couple of times, yes. This was on the restarts, so nothing else was open, and it was at the same time the few times I watched task manager. I'm doing something at this moment where I wouldn't want to restart my pc, but I can try again if necessary later. If it helps, Safe Mode didn't spike anything like this, so having any spike in memory use on loading started with this issue.

I did try Steam's Verify Integrity. Steam didn't say anything. Even if that is normal, than no, that didn't fix the issue.

Same thing with the first answer, I can try different maps at that time. Maybe it'll be fine on super non-intensive maps like Grid-Small-Pure or something since that loads stupid fast, but I've never found poor FPS issues with multiple vehicles on Douglas, Sandy Mountain or Italy. I'd understand a bit more if it rips up RAM in a few minutes, but it only takes a couple seconds for it to go from where everything normally runs to 100% memory usage.

 

Maybe try safe mode, and then download one modded map that had the problem. See if it causes the memory issue. Also, try deactivating all your mods again but also deep clean clear the cache from the launcher.

 

Just thought I'd mention, I just got finished playing half-a-dozen hours of VRChat so I know for a fact hardware isn't an issue with how much that likes hogging RAM.

I just tried running the game normally again, deactivated all mods, tried loading into Industrial Site, and the same thing happened. I couldn't even Alt+F4 quick enough. I got this error message, aswell as BeamNG 0.33.3.0 0xFFFFFFFF again.


Trying Safe Mode, downloaded Neon Parkour from the repo, even put my settings up even higher than I have them normally and everything is running without issue.

A bit later now. I did a deep clean clear cache and tried again, and it still ran up the ram. This has nothing to do with modded maps.

I just recorded a clip from my phone of the game loading while watching Task Manager. Was loading Industrial Site like before.

 

Huh, that's weird. In your video, once the RAM usage hits 100% it stays at 100% but BeamNG's usage drops. I was thinking it could be a problem with your userfolder, since safe mode works fine. Try moving your current userfolder to your desktop, then let the game create a new one by starting the game. Then move anything you want to keep back over, such as settings, mods, configs, etc. Just make sure to check the game after you move something to see if the RAM issue reappears.

 

The game is running fine when I tried that. Going to start replacing stuff and see what it is.

Replaced the whole mods, vehicles, replays, and screenshots folders, everything works fine. Went to replace the settings folder and that's what caused the RAM to spike. Gonna replace each folder in there now.

So, because they seem more important, I'm first testing all the individual files in the settings folder. At first, I believed that the ckgraphics.json was the issue cause it immediately spiked than. I removed it and kept adding the rest back, to success. Eventually I got down to the last 3, which I think I added in together. At that point, the game started running up the ram again. So I Ctrl+Z'd on a couple of attempt and let the game create whatever it needed, but it kept wanting to crash with my original files from "imguiSettings.json" to "floodPresets.json" not even being present. I just removed every file except for default.pc and putting in a backup of the files the game loads into a completely new folder and that's working fine. This is just annoying at this point lmao. I guess I'll try and figure out the password or whatever for making the game not want to die? At the very least keeping my settings of course.