Are you running entirely on the internal drive? Audacity can be super unstable if you make it share files and process data on an external drive.
The farther away, the worse. Most hard-wired external drives (USB/FireWire) can work OK, but the instant you graduate to a home network, you can get into trouble.
Cloud drives can cause constant problems.
Audacity naturally assumes any drive it can see can be used for any job, no matter how delicate, sensitive, or accident prone.
If you split off your external drives and your internal drive can’t support the show, then you may have discovered the second problem. I think it’s still true that Audacity makes a copy of the whole current show each time you make an edit. If you make a mistake and have to Edit > UNDO, Audacity doesn’t unscramble the last edit, it just plays back the last show.
That can scarf up memory in a hurry for a long show.
Also see
Koz