Why has Whonix become unusable.

Once again I believe this pertains to v 10 Tor only; After an hour or so the browser just stops responding. I have Xfce Task Manager installed and Cherrytree note taking but no other software. I open those two pieces of software and the browser and I will have 3-4 windows open maybe 3-4 tabs each and they just freeze up after extended period of time. Security is always kept on Safest o no scripts or vids running ever. I can generally get the browsers to minimize and I see task manager shows cpu pegged at 100% with memory around 70-80% of 2G. I have two add-ons installed One Tab and Tree Style Tab I also run those two addons in my non-Whonix Tor vm and have no issues. It appears as though the cpu is largely allocated to the browser but I can’t say that with certainty. Regardless of how patient I am for resources to clear themselves up I end up killing the Workstation. And this is only when I dont get the non-zero exit code errors. I run updates several days per week and haven’t installed software to bog down the system so I don’t get what the issues are; other than once again Tor v 10.

I don’t know if these issues are simply the failed v 10 Tor and how it’s incorporated into Whonix, or is it a reflection of FF release 78 - junk in junk out. I am looking forward to the day when Tor switches to a chromium platform. At this point who cares about calling home to google if everyone can be made to look the same anyways. This v 10 release Whonix platform has become very troublesome.

Please do not accidentally substitute Tor for a question related to Tor Browser, as this causes confusion.

Try increase VM RAM. And see:

Also possibly worsened by Linux, Debian and VirtualBox which by default doesn’t do well when RAM is full up.

At Kicksecure / Whonix side, in future we might be able to do a bit better here by enforcing how much system resources user user (and/or the graphical and/or application) may use (less than 100%). This might prevent the system from crashing. Maybe only the application would freeze and not freeze the whole system. And if we’re really lucky, in some scenarios, application might even be able to recover from freeze if it didn’t manage to overload the whole system. I might be able to provide a wrapper script to limit system resources application (Tor Browser if we are lucky or any) can use soon. Will post again when ready.

Looks unlikely. There is a years old wiki page. (Says last edited 6 months ago but that is just from the trac to gitlab migration. No progress on that for years.)

EDIT:
Does not work yet…

In development. Try running Tor Browser under constrained system resources program starter wrapper. Updates will be posted in that forum thread. Once installed to /usr/bin.

limit-low torbrowser

or

limit-medium torbrowser

Or if manual wrapper installation is too complicated for now.

Installation required once:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install dbus-user-session

Needs to be run after every reboot (will later be automated by limit-* wrapper):

systemctl -user import-environment

This will be simplified by limit-low.

systemd-run --pty --same-dir --wait --collect --service-type=exec --pipe --user --quiet --nice=19 --property=MemoryAccounting=yes --property=MemoryHigh=300M --property=MemoryMax=500M --property=CPUAccounting=yes --property=CPUQuota=5% --property=CPUWeight=1 --property=CPUShares=2 --property=TasksAccounting=yes --property=TasksMax=200 --property=IOAccounting=yes --property=IOWeight=1 '--property=IOReadIOPSMax=/dev/disk/ 1K' -- torbrowser

This will be simplified by limit-medium.

systemd-run --pty --same-dir --wait --collect --service-type=exec --pipe --user --quiet --nice=10 --property=MemoryAccounting=yes --property=MemoryHigh=1000M --property=MemoryMax=1100M --property=CPUAccounting=yes --property=CPUQuota=80% --property=CPUWeight=80 --property=CPUShares=900 --property=TasksAccounting=yes --property=TasksMax=3000 --property=IOAccounting=yes --property=IOWeight=80 -- torbrowser

(This command line was generated by using bash -x limit-low torbrowser / bash -x limit-medium torbrowser.)


Btw not sure it matters (since chromium based Tor Browser not on horizon anyhow), and you didn’t say that specifically, but don’t hope fore Firefox to die. Reasons for that:
General Threats to User Freedom

Just to put things in context a bit for me; this wrapper with resource limitation - is it similar ro right clicking on the event in task manager and assigning priority low / normal / high?

Komms via Whonix Forum:

Just to put things in context a bit for me; this wrapper with resource limitation - is it similar ro right clicking on the event in task manager and assigning priority low / normal / high?

No. Would be happy if it was that easy. I don’t think that does much.
Helps much. System resource restricting (CPU, RAM, IO) a single
application, setting a threshold in percent such as 90%, is actually
quite difficult.