Troubleshooting for common problems with Gringotts ================================================== Startup failure --------------- If gringotts crashes on startup with a segmentation fault or the message "gringotts-CRITICAL **: Increase the memory locking limit to at least 51200000 bytes. Current limit: bytes.", you have to increase the locked memory on your system. It might also be a good idea to switch to check if your login manager properly supports PAM (for example the wdm login program does not support PAM). a) Replace 'mylogin' with your username, and add the lines below to /etc/security/limits.conf. See the documentation at the beginning of limits.conf for more info about these values. # mylogin soft memlock 50000 mylogin hard memlock 50000 b) Enable the pam_limits.so module in all PAM login managers, for example in /etc/pam.d/{login,xdm,gdm,ssh}. c) Log out, and log in again. Now your memlock limit should be 50000 KBytes (or roughly 50MB). Verify this by executing ulimit: $ ulimit -l 50000 If you want to understand the above steps, read along. Since kernel 2.6.9, the amount of locked memory is limited for normal users. But gringotts needs locked memory, lots of it. And when it does not get enough locked memory gringotts just exits. So the above steps increase the amount of locked memory each user is allowed to have. a) The limits.conf configures resource limits. See the documentation at the beginning of the file what each entry means. b) The limits.conf directory is activated by the pam_limits.so PAM module. So the module has to be enabled in all PAM applications you use to login into your machine. c) After logging in again, the limits should be set. Note that Gringotts can only use memory locking when it has the setuid bit set in its permissions. If you do not want memory locking enabled anyway, use dpkg-statoverride(8) to remove the setuid bit. But I do not recommend this. Gringotts is very slow ---------------------- You most certainly have a debug build of gringotts which enables mudflap support. This slows down gringotts a lot. To disable mudflap, set this environment variable: $ export MUDFLAP_OPTIONS="-mode-nop" For more information about mudflap, see http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/Mudflap%20Pointer%20Debugging -- Bastian Kleineidam