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I'm on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.I'm running Whonix as a VM in VirtualBox. Whonix runs slow and will occasionally freeze up on me forcing me to shut the computer down by holding down the power button on the PC and then turning it back on. What can I do to improve the performance of Whonix on my Ubuntu machine?

My PC was built in 2015. It's got a 4 core AMD CPU, 16 gigs of ram, a budget AMD GPU, and an HDD.

NotTheDr01ds
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James1
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  • A new OS and a very old computer, a bad combo. Maybe try something like LUbuntu – David DE Jun 21 '25 at 15:28
  • @DavidDE So Linux has a learning curve to it and Ubuntu is the most widely used Linux distribution and so Ubuntu has a massive support community behind it so I have to stay on Ubuntu. With that said by putting in an SSD and making these changes to ram and cores, Whonix hasn't frozen up on me even once and it runs quite smoothly. And within a year or 2 I should finally be getting a new PC. – James1 Jun 21 '25 at 15:55

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So if you go here to the documentation and read you'll notice it says for best performance you should use an SSD.

Also to help improve Whonix performance.

  1. Select gateway and then click on Settings enter image description here

  2. You should see this screen, now select System and then here is where you can choose how much ram gateway uses. Set gateway to use 512 MB of ram (also make sure to bump workstation's ram up to 4 GB) now when you set gateway to 512 MB of ram it'll automatically open up in command line interface CLI mode, so not graphical user interface GUI mode. Why? Cause CLI uses less resources. Now listen you'll definitely want to use workstation in a GUI but a GUI is not absolutely necessary for gateway, and if you ever want to use gateway in a GUI again just increase the ram back to normal. enter image description here

  3. Select just 1 core for gateway and then 2 cores for workstation which leaves just 1 core for Ubuntu the host OS (cause you know you have a 4 core CPU). enter image description here

This is how you change ram and cores for workstation as well. It's the same thing, select workstation and then click on Settings.

As a side note, if you've got a modern PC with an 8 core CPU and 32 gigs of ram then go and give gateway 2 gigs of ram and give workstation 4 gigs of ram. And I think by default gateway uses 3 cores and then 3 cores for workstation, which is fine.

Oh yeah, if you do give gateway 512MB of ram and run it in CLI. You see what the red arrow is pointing to. There's no need to enter in username and password just move on and fire up workstation from this point. I wanted to point this out cause I was stupidly entering in username and password here, I did that for a while til I caught myself lol. enter image description here

This should immensely improve your performance.

James1
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