Past few days my whonix workstation has frozen twice now. I have enough resources allocated to the workstation with 6gb of ram and 6 cpu cores. I tried searching other topics but all related mostly to ram which is not an issue in my case. The workstation is not under a lot of pressure I have a few browser tabs open and run a monero local node wallet. When the freeze happens no shortcuts work to even open terminal or anything. When trying to shut down it must be done via the ‘Power off the machine’ option because the ‘Send the shutdown signal’ option does nothing.
I would like to know if anyone else has run into freezing and what can be the cause or fix for this?
You got an 8 core CPU and an SSD? You can free up resources by doing this, in VirtualBox go to gateway and click on settings and go to system and then reduce the ram to 512MB. Well I’ve got a 4 core CPU and 16 gigs of ram so for me, gateway uses one core and ram is set to 512MB which forces gateway to run in CLI and not GUI, which is totally fine for gateway. You need graphical user interface GUI for workstation though. And when gateway runs in CLI you can just shut if off like you usually do by clicking the X
My workstation uses 2 cores (one core is for the host OS) and 4 gigs of ram, I’ve experimented though, sometimes I’ve given 6 gigs of ram to workstation, settled at 4. I used to have an HDD and Whonix workstation would freeze up on me about once every 10 days or so it seemed. Since installing an SSD it hasn’t frozen up on me, thank god too. In fact go here Whonix System Requirements the first thing it says for best performance is to use an SSD.
As an aside, this info will also go into my big beautiful tutorial I’m gonna make here soon once I get everything figured out, boy it’s been a journey trying to figure out Whonix, and it shouldn’t have to be this hard. I’m gonna pour everything I know about Whonix into this tutorial. I think it’s gonna be well received on askubuntu. This tutorial will be to help out others who are just starting out with Whonix and don’t quite know what to do, you know, sitting there scratching their head going “So what do I do?”
I have a 16 core cpu and now 8 of those cores are dedicated to the workstation. I run on ssd. I will keep monitoring and trying to see what might be causing this. When I check the workstation activity in virtualbox I see that the cpu load is jumping between 60-80% on 8 cpu cores when I have tor open with 4 tabs and notepad open. Is that normal?
It can be random. Not often to stop using Whonix but often enough to write this post. Maybe once every 2-4 weeks. I just make sure to do more snapshots and backups.
One thing which can cause freezing is if your Host Linux OS uses Wayland. The solution is to disable Mini Toolbar. It’s a bug in Virtual Box and happens when you switch to full screen.
Patrick was this directed at me specifically? I’ve got a 4 core CPU. I assign one core to gateway and I’ve given gateway 512MB of ram so it opens in CLI and then 2 cores for workstation which leaves one core for the host OS. If I remember correctly I was advised to to do this by someone over on Reddit.
Hello. First, find out the cause of the freeze - run a system monitor or install Conky and monitor which applications and services are consuming resources - watch the CPU and memory. Most often, the system freezes due to memory, not the CPU. Some programs may consume a lot of memory. Whonix froze on my computer only in live mode - memory is critically important in this mode. Whonix froze for my friend when he opened 30 browser tabs + a messenger, the system ran out of memory.
Hey I’ve got a 4 core CPU and 16 gigs of ram, I was told to use 1 core for gateway and 2 cores for workstation leaving 1 core for the host OS, and to give 512MB of ram to gateway so it opens in CLI, and I give 4 gigs of ram to workstation.
Patrick is my setup ok, should I also use less CPUs? What would you change about my setup?
You mean 1 core for gateway, 1 core for workstation, and 1 core for host? Is that what you’re telling that man to do?
Another VM = same setting. Maximum core assigned = 3
Documentation is for 1 VM. Not for multiple VMs. So the instructions
apply to each VM individually. Keep it simple.
Why 3? Because there will be few CPUs nowadays with less than 4. So 3 is
a safe number for those trying to solve freeze issues. It’s not a magic
number everyone must stick to. If other settings work, no need to change.
And CPU settings changes are only useful in case of performance or
freeze issues. If you’re not having any, don’t let this forum thread
confuse you and ignore it.
The title of that wiki page is “Tuning”. If you’re not turning, ignore
it. That wiki page also states that it is optional.
You mean 1 core for gateway, 1 core for workstation, and 1 core for host?
That’s not what documentation is saying at all. Documentation is complete.
The mini toolbar from the settings. It doesn’t have anything to do with this freezing though so forget it. Yesterday the vm freezed three or four times then some days it doesn’t freeze at all. Maybe it has something to do with connected USB drives. The freezing can happen immediately after the OS loads to desktop or when doing something. Usually I move a window when it happens.