Here's what I do. Before I begin to play and start up the game, I clean my RAM to insure I always have enough RAM available to play. I clean out my cache files (doesn't matter if you play in Windows or the Mac OS) to insure that corruption is kept at a minimum. I've been doing this since I always had to do this when playing Sims 2. I play with all the worlds modified by Ella Charmed from MTS. (I use her profile to find her blog and download the worlds from there). I don't have much 3rd party content, but I do have lots of Sims 3 Store content, but that rarely causes the game to crash.
I play on the Mac side, but then I have a desktop 2012 27" iMac.