Arch Linux

TySpicer

Member

Registered: 2025-08-31

Posts: 101

[SOLVED] Ardour - Maximum amount of locked memory

Ardour is giving me this message when it opens:

WARNING: Your system has a limit for maximum amount of locked memory. This might cause Ardour to run out of memory before your system runs out of memory.

You can view the memory limit with 'ulimit -l', and it is normally controlled by /etc/security/limits.conf

I figured I'd take a look, so I found the config file it described. I also found its man page: https://man.archlinux.org/man/limits.conf.5

I think I mostly understand it, but I'd like to verify some things. It looks like the syntax of each parameter is this:

<domain> <type> <item> <value>

<domain> - It looks like this would be my username.
<type> - It looks like this can be `hard` or `soft`. Does it matter too much which one I pick? I'm not sure which one would be better.
<item> - It looks like memlock is what I'm looking for.
<value> - I may have to do some unit conversion here. fastfetch says I have 11.59 GiB of memory. This website says that's about 12 million KB. Would it be safe to plug in this number, or should I go a bit lower? I noticed I can also put a value of -1 for unlimited memory. Would this be a valid/safe option?

So altogether, I think I should append this line to the end of `limits.conf`, with perhaps some modifications from the above questions:

tyspicer hard memlock 12444667

Does this look right?

Last edited by TySpicer (2025-10-04 15:08:58)

seth

Member

From: Don't DM me only for attention

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 68,722

Re: [SOLVED] Ardour - Maximum amount of locked memory

memlock defaults to 8MB (8192) - unless you're running into problems (failing to load projects) you can leave that alone, otherwise 32768 (32MB) seems excessive here.
Sanity check:

uname -l
head /etc/security/limits.d/*

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apaz

Member

Registered: 2018-07-23

Posts: 127

Re: [SOLVED] Ardour - Maximum amount of locked memory

You can manually edit “limits.conf”, but I find it more practical to use the “realtime-privileges” package (https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/an … rivileges/). Install it, then add your user to the “realtime” group and restart. That's all you need to do; Ardour will work without any problems.

TySpicer

Member

Registered: 2025-08-31

Posts: 101

Re: [SOLVED] Ardour - Maximum amount of locked memory

Great, looks like this works! I went to install realtime-privileges, and it looked like it was already installed, which is cool. Then I ran

sudo gpasswd -a tyspicer realtime

,

then rebooted. I opened up Ardour, and it started without the warning message. As far as I can tell, it seems to be running smoother than it normally does. I use Ardour as a guitar amp, and it used to crackle sometimes, like playing with a bad cable. So far, it looks like this fixed the issue, which is awesome!

Thanks for the help!