Veracrypt Hidden Volume VERY Slow, Windows 7, File Opening and File Operations

[Jacobov Landau]

Hi, any hint / help is appreciated to "speedup" Veracrypt.
I have FileContainers of 20 to 30 GB Size, encryption details attached.
I mount them on Windows7 as hidden volumes.
So far all great.

Accessing the files in these containers is a nightmare. It can take a minute to open a file, to rename it, or move it to another folder. Any file operation (open, move, copy, rename) ends in windows explorer showing a green bar (similar to a progress bar when searching for files) or the associated program to wait for the file to load.

I never had such an effect with TrueCrypt, but with VeraCrypt its always persistent for at least 2 years. I have kept my VeraCrypt updated once a new version came out, but no version solved this problem. Right now I run the 1.24 Beta 5.

As my computer works great for all other stuff this effect is very likely to be in VeraCrypt.
I have AES hardware speedup activated, and tried a bit with the settings, all to no avail.
A web-search found some mention of the same issues but not a single comment or solution posted.

Any ideas what the problem could be?
Any other settings for hash / encryption algorithm recommended to speed up?

Thanks for comments.

[Kurt Fitzner]

Hi Jacobov,

Without being able to duplicate your problem it's hard to diagnose. I just made myself a 20GiB outer container and a 10GiB inner container and was able to copy large amounts of files to it with no issues. I am getting sustained write speeds of about 90MiB/s, which is quite a bit slower than my drive (sustained write speed about ~240MiB/s), but then again I tested my inner container with the slowest cypher combination there is (Kuznyecik(Serpent(Camellia))), plus the container resides on an NTFS drive that is system encrypted with Serpent(AES), so 90MiB/s to the inner container when it's being encrypted with 5 cyphers is not bad throughput.

What you are experiencing does not sound like a problem with encryption speed. It sounds like some sort of odd race condition. Is the inner container NTFS? Is the drive that is hosting the container file also NTFS? If so, it could be a bad interaction of a journaling filesystem being stored on another journaling filesystem.

If it's not already, try making your outer and inner containers both exFAT and see if that makes a difference.

If you are still experiencing very slow performance, check your task manager to see what the CPU is doing. Is it pegged at 100%? I suspect it won't be.

Lastly, while I do not want to hijack this to a discussion on the merits of hidden containers, I must say I do not recommend their use. This is one area where Mounier and I disagree. I believe them to be extremely dangerous "mommy medicine" (medicine that parents use to make themselves think they are doing something but which really has no effect). Your reasons for using a hidden container are your own, but do not use it with the expectation that you can deny the pressence of the inner container to any adversary of even moderate technical capability.

[Jacobov Landau]

Hi Kurt, thanks for your message, I did some testing and recorded some videos to let people see the effect.

I tested myself with some containers, i.e. diverse combinations of hidden / non hidden containers, diverse filesystems. All had the same effects, it seems these features are not related to the problem.

The extremely slow opening of files and file operations in general is just occurring on VeraCrypt containers. I tried to have the container local on the disk, or on a USB disk, no difference again.

The extremely slow opening of files and file operations just occurs for files in VeraCrypt containers, not for any file / folder on a "normal" windows folder. Additionally it affects all files / file types. I basically use office / pdf / pictures / text, nothing specical. All files the same.

I noticed for files which I open frequently there is no such opening delay. I open some xls files regularly via a shortcut on my desktop. When opening the same file via directly browsing via explorer to the file and opening it the delay happens again. It looks like there is a cache or so, or somehow the path is stored, seems repeated action avoids the effect.

When I copy or move files into the container it works fast and without any recognizable delay. But later on opening the files or performing any file operation is extremely slow, up to a minute per file.

I totally love the concept of having containers that I store as single encrypted files and can backup them in clouds, etc. I hope this issue can be sorted out.

I have a windows 7, 64 bit professional installation. There is Kaspersky Antivirus running configured from my IT department, i cannot switch it off or pause it sadly. Probably that has an influence.

However, I am almost sure I am the only one having this problem. Any hint would be great to have!

[Jacobov Landau]

anybody ... ?