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Performance Problems and Out Of Memory Panics Caused by Password Hashing

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This page only applies to you if you use Argon2 instead of BCrypt hashing

To securely check if passwords match, Ory Kratos stores the Argon2 hash of every password. This algorithm has to be tuned to match the desired security level as well as responsiveness. Because it isn't easy to determine the exact values without trying them out, Ory Kratos comes with a CLI that automatically calibrates the values, following best practices. You can read more about these best practices in our blog post.

Common Errors​

There are some errors that indicate your Argon2 parameters need adjustment:

  1. Very slow login and registration requests, might cause network timeouts;
  2. Ory Kratos fails with fatal error: runtime: out of memory;
  3. The host environment on Minikube, Docker, or Kubernetes crashes or becomes unresponsive;

In any of these cases, try reducing the resources used by Argon2 or increasing the resources available to Kratos. Use the Argon2 calibrate CLI to detect the best practice values for your server. Note that the calibration has to be done under the exact same conditions that the server runs at.