I have a project which is prone to crashing during saving. It has various plugins in use but none that I don't use successfully in other projects, and in equal quantities. But what is most strange about this project is that when I go to save it, the memory usage reported by Windows Task Manager jumps up from just over 800MB to up to 3GB. If the save completes, the memory is deallocated again, but if memory usage has gone up during the session, a save (or an auto-save) will usually go over the 3GB limit, crash Sonar, and I lose my edits.
 
Has anybody else encountered anything like this? And are there any settings I can use to work around this obviously bizarre behaviour? I really need to be able to finish this project and stripping out all the plugins is not an option.

I haven't seen that, but then I usually freeze my big RAM-eaters as I go. If you've got any Kontakt or drum libraries in the project, try freezing them first. I can't imagine what else would be gobbling memory like that other than a sampler.

There are no samplers involved in the project. And besides, it's not about there being a plugin that intrinsically uses a lot of RAM - it's about something suddenly needing 2GB more RAM purely during the save process.

Do you have paging disabled? Or perhaps a too-low limit on virtual memory size?
 
When I encounter weird sh*t like this I usually start by doing a global fx bypass to see if a plugin is causing the problem. Normally, effects are not RAM-guzzlers, but there are exceptions. Got any convolution reverbs in the project? How about non-bounced V-Vocal clips? AudioSnap-enabled clips?

Paging is enabled. Not that it makes any difference - I have 8GB of RAM and Sonar 32bit can only use 3GB of it at any time anyway, and that's the limit it hits.
 
I'm not using any V-Vocal or Audiosnap clips. I have lots of convolution in the project but the files they use are tiny (eg. <5ms) and again, they don't use much memory during normal use. This is something going wrong during Sonar's save process.
 
Global bypass on the effects bins makes no difference when the project is saved. Not surprising since all the effects are still in the project.

If it is just the one project, you might want to recreate it.

That is probably going to be my next step, although copying everything across is going to be a real hassle.

If it does not crash 100% of the time, you could try a "Save as." It might clear up the glitch.

It crashes 100% of the time if the current memory use is high enough.

It sounds like a bad project. The only other idea I have would be to selectively archive tracks and see if the problem is isolated to a few tracks.