This may not relate to UnrealEditor per se, but I have thus issue with larger levels, in multiple versions of the program.
I encountered the problem with a big level in a project I have worked on several weeks ago. Opening it always took time, and in 5.7 I always got that memory warning popping up, freezing other apps for seconds multiple times, but it always loaded completely and I could well work on it, eben play in editor, though with warnings and messages and hickups.
Until a few days ago.
Opening that level took at least an hour, but it froze the whole system when at 85% of compiling shaders. Completely. The system enenrually restarted itself, without intervention.
In a second attempt, the system froze completely again, when compiling the shaders was at 45%..
After restarting the system by hand, I tried another level, same size but without additions I made it in the first opened level, it made it to 65% and the system froze.
Tried that level in the original project, under 5.3: same issue.
Another project, smaller, and using world partitions, in 5.6, loaded the one region that I closed it on, but it took more than 30 minutes, at least twice as much timeas before. But when trying to play in the editor (plsy from here) the system hung again, and finally restarted itself.
Of course I checked usage of memory, disk acess and CPU and GPU use, my suspicion is that the system is paging heavily, and in the end, is just thrashing.
I have two internal HDD with a 512Gb pagefile each, and in the end, one if them is 100% busy, the other one between 30% and 80%, with relatively low average CPU usage. When the system freezes, these measurements freeze as well. Even mouse and keyboard are ‘dead’.
In these few weeks, the only changes to the system are the usual Windows updates and updates of the Nvidia Studio driver.
I had my system BIOS set to XMP1 over clocking, all on auto, switched that off but that made no difference.
My system has Intel 13900F CPU, 64 Gb of RAM, Nvidia 4090 graphic card and runs Windows 11 Pro
Any idea and hint to get these projects working again is appreciated