I used ulimit as you told me and Apache dumped a core file at the next segmentation fault. I ran this with gdb (typed 'gdb httpd <core-file>' in the Apache 'bin' directory) For some reason, somewhere in libpthread.so.0, Apache is invoking _PR_CreateThread from ../../../../mozilla/nsprpub/pr/src/pthreads/pthreads.c. This file, however, is apparently not found, be cause I get "../../../../mozilla/nsprpub/pr/src/pthreads/pthread.c: No such file or directory." Similarly, it doesn't find sslsnce.c. Now, from now on, the httpd process in GDB either exits normally, or produces segmentation faults at different points of its execution. I don't always get this segmentation fault almost immediately when I start Apache. Sometimes it would produce output to the point that I starts waiting for connections, but then when I connect to it through FF, the browser would be waiting to receive the server_hello but it wouldn't come. Sometimes, the TLS handshake continues even further. In he meantime, I checked my database, it seems to be fine, even though SSL_TRC still produces that -8174 error. I checked inside nss_engine_init.c, NSS_Initialize() returns SECSuccess. I am not quite sure this guarantees that the database is good. Any suggestions? Regards, Peter