Ardour, system has a limit for maximum amount of locked memory

Question

After installing and starting Ardour I receive the following warning message:

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

How to configure properly Ardour to avoid this message?

Solution

Launch a terminal (CTRL-ALT-T) and open the file in gedit with admin priveldges:

sudo gedit /etc/security/limits.conf

Be sure that the file contains the following line:

@audio - memlock unlimited

If it doesn't exist, add it. If it does exist, be sure the line doesn't begin with a # and is below any other lines in the file beginning with @audio. This will allow any user in the audio group to avoid memlock limits. Save, close the editor, then add your user to the group by running the command

sudo adduser $USER audio

Close the terminal, log out and back in again, and reopen Ardour. The message should be gone. 

Comments

[Rubens Mariuzzo]

Nice! I will give it a try this week since I have a recording session. Thanks!

[Panther]

Unlike many warnings, it is NOT TRUE you can ignore this warning. When recording in real time with Ardour, if you run out of memory, it will affect the recording. I would not say you can " safely ignore it" . For this reason I am downvoting this answer.

[Bhikkhu Subhuti]

I fixed this code window.. needed a dash. Thanks for the tip.. it works now. You can test this with ulmit -l

[somethis]

The above didn't work for me on Ubuntu 16.10. instead I followed these directions. The narration is in German but the commands are all the same ... wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Tonstudio/Konfiguration/…

[baptx]

@somethis yes, we have to add @audio - memlock unlimited with the dash, it looks like a mistake in this answer.