I just spent about 30 minutes doing this, and i shaved a meg off my savegame size. Try it, see if it works.

Steps:

• go to your house (or some safe, small, interior space where you won't get yelled at for trespassing)
  
• save your game
  
• quit Skyrim
  
• boot Skyrim and load up your save
  
• hit select, and set the wait time for 24 hours
  
• repeat the last step until the month changes (frostfall -> sun's dusk, etc...) this may take quite a while.
  
• save your game

I have no idea if the PS3 performance issues are related to the size of the savegame, nor do I know exactly why this reduces it, but I have a theory:
Every plant you harvest, corpse you loot, Skeever you kill sticks around in game.. for a while, but not forever.
Might be related to the seasons, might not. I 'waited' for about 20 days in order to get the month to change. At that point, I got my game save from 6.7 megs down to 5.8 megs. I'm not a hoarder, and have probably about 250 items in my containers and inventory. Selling everything you 'own' before trying this would probably yield much better results, but at the end of the day, the game still needs to be playable, so keeping inventory isn't really optional.

Let me know if you try this and it makes a difference.

Interesting. I'll give it a go, and post results!

That is because it takes one month for everything to respawn , and it does work

Wow. A workaround that might actually work until we get a patch!

Now let's see how long it takes the naysayers to ruin this thread....

Wasn't it one week for everything to respawn in Oblivion? It seems like I remember going back to the fort across from the prison you come out of at the beginning waiting for the bandits to spawn because I was trying to land an elven bow in loot so I could train my marksman.

It was three in-game days I believe. At least that's when aggression wore off in any towns you offended, and you could re-raid a dungeon.

3 days for everything to respawn in Oblivion, in Skyrim its a month.

And I bet this is how they'll handle the patch. They'll knock down the repsawn to a more managable level.

Any confirmation of this working? I'm in the middle of a quest but I'll try it in a bit.

Who needs debugging when you can just cut features out of the game. Not that it matters anyway because:


SPOILER!



It barely helps.

If that's all they do, it won't be much.

My game size is 12 megs already. If waiting for the respawn only knocked a meg off, then it'll barely scratch the surface of the issue.

SPOILER


















if you do it long enough it will help alot btw your horrible at trolling and bashing on companies

I don't know about you, but i didn't pay hard earned money to sit around trying to lower the size of a savegame file, so i can play the bloody game!!

And i, rather pretentiously, wont touch the game until Bethesda have gotten up off their lazy [censored]'s and fixed the game they built up to be so damn great. I paid for what was promised, not the crap i've been given.

I imagine the bigger the savegame, the more benefit you'll get from letting the game flush out all the leftovers.

That said, has anyone noticed an improvement from this?
I figured this out, but for all I know, it has zero effect on game performance.

Ignorance is bliss i gess. You can do it for 24 hours straight if you want, it won't change a [censored] thing after the first time you do it

Never underestimate the power of placebo.

But the last thing you killed will re-spawn a month after you killed it, not just at the turning of the month like was suggested in the OP. Therefore, you'd need to "wait" a full month after you last killed something for it to be cleared form the save. ie; if you kill a Mammoth on the 29th, it won't disappear the next day, but 30 days after you killed it. So, waiting a full month, not just until the month changes, may be the real solution for getting a significant drop in the save file size.

Then whats your idea got anything to help instead of calling people ignorant and calling bethesda frauds.

There is something you need to understand. This problem is related to the poor job Bethesda done of porting the game , designed for the 360 , to the PS3. It's the game's code that's faulty. The only thing that would "help", is Bethesda holding their hands up, admitting they are in the wrong, and actually fixing it, not releasing a Patch that promises much, but delivers little, as has been the case in their previous games.

I don't understand people like you. I get that you want to play the game, everyone does, but it's not your fault that they released a faulty product and there is nothing you can do about it. As far as I'm concerned complaining is helping, because it's just about the only thing that we can do. I don't feel like Bethesda should get away with this travesty and i don't want anyone else to spend their hard earned money only to be disappointed, so i complain.

They need to fix it yes but calling them frauds is not helping what we need to do is find a temp. solution until they fix it.

Again, you're getting riled up about speculation. You are speculating that Bethesda is going to ignore this, and are getting riled up on that alone. Wait until the patch, and in the meantime let's work on a work-around like has been suggested in this thread. Running around saying it's not going to work, without even trying it, makes absolutely no sense to me. Should we have to find a work-around? No. but here we are, and yelling loudly isn't going to make anything better for anyone. Bethesda may or may not fix it. But in the meantime, why not try something so you can play it?

Complainig is not helping providing info on what we believe is happening is helping and so far thats the save file memory reaching astronomical heights causing the game to lag and crash.

The truth rarely helps, but that does not stop it from being true.

And as i have said before, i did not pay hard earned money to attempt to find solutions or work-arounds to problems that should never have existed in the first place!! I paid money for a product marketed to be equal to it's counterparts on other platforms. It is not so much to ask that a game developer supplies a game that matches the marketing campaign!

I have just sat through the 20min demo Todd commentates over, and the resounding thought? "Wow... That's what this game SHOULD look like..."


The fact is, this "fix" isn't that at all. It's a major annoyance, and something that will have to be done for hours on end to even have a chance of solving the problems.

There is no fix that you and I can do. The only people that can fix it, are Bethesda, and given the fact they are the ones who deemed the current coding acceptable in the first place, my hopes are not high.

I don't think there's any confusion about that. Everyone is on the same page.

The way I see it, it could be weeks before gamesas gets a patch pushed through Sony's Format QA, even if they already have it fixed.
In the mean-time, there's no reason not to be proactive and experiment with finding a workaround.
Admittedly, this is a lame one, but if nothing else, it could help resolve whether or not the problem is savedata size-related like everyone suspects.
Or it may be pointless.

We don't need to get angry at each other.