In my latest playthrough I'm running any quest mod that teases my curiosity.
But I'm also a Completionist (or 'Garbage Collector/Resource Hoarder', if you prefer), I have as much stuff as I can find stored in chests, wardrobes or desks - everything from every mod (armors, weapons, statics, journals, notes etc as well as tons of ores, ingots, hides and gems even if I might not need all of them.
And recently, with my new GPU, a GTX 660 2GB, I noticed Skyrim is very buggy. Random CTDs are the most annoying, of course, but the loading time is very frustrating. Worse! The overall performance is not greater than it was with my iGPU.
I read here and there that big save game files (mine are ~25MB each) can cause these issues. I tried to clean them with tools provided in Nexus site but the size still the same, which probably means there is no unintentional leftovers.
So to summarise: Does collecting stuff in Skyrim cause instability?
If I want to reduce my save game files, and thus reduce the stuttering, lag, random CTDs and long load times, do I have to empty all my bookshelves (which I filled with every single book, mostly handpicked in Apocrypha), dispose all unique items coming from quest mods, reduce my storage to a barely minimum amount of supplies and throw away all armor sets of each tier just to get stability?