How much memory are you running anyways?
Referring to
https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/442609, it will just be 2Gb and Yarlen's out-of-memory guess is probably spot on.
wish there was a way to modify my background running programs to free up memory without crashing my system
Not unless you really, really know what you're doing.
It probably wouldn't free up that much anyway, so is rarely worth the risk.
What you can safely do though is close any foreground/desktop apps, eg web browser, mail client, media player, document editor etc. That should free up some memory - it's surprising just how much memory some apps require these days.
