If you're using Trinidad to run your JRuby/Rails application and you get SEVERE: A child container failed during start its likely that the JVM isn't getting enough memory. Maybe you're using Spring and a host of other jars that your application relies upon. You can get around this by running:

# shell  
jruby -J-Xmx1024m -S trinidad

So how do you do this in a production environment? You could of course pass along the same command line options, or for better configuration management you can use the Trinidad Daemon extension.

# ./Gemfile  
  ⋮ 
  gem 'trinidad'
  gem 'trinidad_daemon_extension'
  gem 'trinidad_logging_extension' # optional, hah! who're we kidding?
  ⋮

And then some configuration options:

# ./config/trinidad.yml  
jruby\_max\_runtimes: 1 # also enables threadsafe by convention  
libs_dir: lib # by default this is lib/jars - but if you're coming from Warbler you might be accustomed to /lib

extensions:  
  logging: # logging always a good idea
    config: lib/resources/log4j.properties
    logging_system: log4j
  daemon:
    jvm_args: '-Xmx1024m'

Now just jruby -S trinidad for your production environment or your dev workstations and the configuration environment will be the same. And if you've setup everything correctly you can still be rails s which also means your Spork/Guard/RSpec world will continue to function as well.