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Installation crashes on high core-count CPUs due to uncapped parallelism and missing pagefile validation #2930

Description

@Anschra

CPU: Intel i9-13900K (32 logical processors)
RAM: 64 GB
Pagefile: 4 GB (Windows default for high-RAM systems)
Wabbajack: 4.2.1.4
Modlist: LoreRim 5.0.3.5

Problem:

On systems with high core counts, Wabbajack sets all parallelism values to 32 threads by default. During the "File Extractor" phase, this causes ~2000+ concurrent 7z.exe processes, leading to:

Kernel crashes (BSOD) when pagefile is insufficient — WdFilter.sys lock conflicts under extreme I/O load
Silent .NET heap crash (coreclr.dll, 0xC0000409) after ~2274 extracted files when memory is exhausted

Root causes identified:

Parallelism is scaled to CPU core count, not available memory
No pre-installation check for pagefile size (Lorerim requires ~40 GB)
No graceful OOM error handling — Wabbajack dies silently with no user-facing message

Suggested fixes:

Add a pre-flight check: warn if pagefile < [modlist-defined minimum], e.g. 40960
Cap default parallelism for File Extractor and VFS at a memory-aware value, not raw core count — e.g. min(cores, availableRAMgb / 2)
Catch OutOfMemoryException in the extraction pipeline and surface a meaningful error message with a link to the performance settings

Workaround:

Reduce "File Extractor" and "VFS" threads to 2 in Wabbajack settings. Installation completes successfully.

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