Sorry if this is the wrong place, not 100% sure where to post this. With that said:
I am disappointed in VPN connections after upgrading my internet connection to 300mbps (and surprisingly getting up to 350) and yet only getting 65-70 mbps throughput down. My PC is good, my server location is less than 200 miles from me (with good latency on tests), and I’ve tried a few protocols (all of which seem to get around the same speed with exceptions on ones that tank to <10 mbps).
What’s happening? I have a few guesses, but can’t nail anything down solidly.
Your speed is always going to be limited by the slowest component in the path. Your computer, router, modem, the various switches and interconnects, the equipment your vpn uses, the speed of the server you’re connecting to, etc. If any of those get bogged down by excessive use, well your connection suffers.
There’s also the overhead incurred by encrypting the data at both ends. The sheer math involved boggles the mind. Your vpn can only transmit as fast as it can encrypt / decrypt.
Good luck finding a VPN provider that will give you 300 mbps speeds.
70 mbps is plenty. Even outside of a VPN you won’t find many servers that will let you download anything from them at 70 mbps. The only benefit you see from a connection as fast as yours is when downloading from more than one source. If the fastest a sever on average can dish out to you is for example 50 mbps then your 300mbps benefits you when you are downloading from 6 different servers at 50 mbps.
Now of course if you want all your traffic tunnelled through your VPN now your VPN becomes a greater bottleneck. What I suggest is that you for starters optimize your VPN for speed, for example use AES 128 rather than 256 bit because they are both secure but 128 will be faster. Don’t use a typical router for the VPN. If you want a router level VPN build one with desktop/server hardware with fast processor that has hardware AES encryption support. Assuming the VPN server is the issue though avoid having all your traffic tinned through one server. Setup each device in your house with a different VPN server. Have your phone and laptop use different servers. If you want to get all techy you could set up a VPN router that routes different traffic over different VPN servers in the fly for you in the background. This will take some configuring.
Speed is influenced by your connection to the VPN server, the VPN servers load, the VPN protocol used (OpenVPN, PPTP or L2TP). Despite this, most of the speed problems are down to the overall Internet speed between you and the country you are connecting to.
I used to have this problem, and I assumed it was the VPN, but it was actually my ISP throttling my connection.
Solution?
I switched to a VPN service that provides what is called “SSL tunneling”. Basically, my VPN sends out my entire connection as SSL data (i.e. the same kind of data detected by my ISP when I’m using my banking website, or even reddit).
This has the magical effect of fooling my ISP’s throttling algorithms, and I actually have significantly faster internet with my VPN than without.
Right. 300Mbps would take lots of CPU for encryption/decryption. Maybe OP should switch to weaker encryption, if speed matters so much. Or run the VPN client in a dedicated device with serious CPU, or even a crypto co-processor. Also check with the provider, and see whether they can handle that. Decent VPNs are using 10Gbps uplinks now, so 300Mbps should be easy.
Edit: Or run multiple clients, in VMs, and get 5x60Mbps or whatever.
Problem with switching outlets is they’re all significantly farther away, but I am doing testing on locations and protocols available at them. Got a notepad going and everything. Interestingly, OpenVPN with UDP seems a tad faster than L2TP/IPSec at the same location.
I have a little program that actually uses multiple connections to maximize download speed for those annoying downloads that go well under 1 MBps (nvidia drivers for ex.). With the program, it maxes out the connection, or in my case, 16 connections.
I was as well, even with good hardware (dual/tri-band card) and a strong, relatively close by signal. With a 900 (card) mbps/2 across both frequencies I only get maybe 100 ideally and for less than ten seconds always. Turns out literally any other broadcasts on the same frequency screw with bandwidth something awful and 5Ghz just has no wall penetration. Something to be said about wired and its necessity for a good time to come from that alone (could you imagine a Google data center run on wireless?).
It also hurts a lot that most routers are configured for “auto” and seem to follow your router around the channel bands when you manually configure them (but the router can detect other networks far better than my PC or phone it seems) to what seems to be wireless harassment. Meanwhile the 5Ghz band is criminally unused (just me and one other network there). No overlap on channels there too. Looking forward to more use there (and 60Ghz wi-gig later if that can go through more than a piece of paper). I think if wi-fi is to be used well it will have to be very intelligently managed to avoid interference as much as possible.
One of the reasons it seems faster with the VPN is compression and fool-able speed testing sites. Other testing sites seem to correct for this, but also give ridiculously low speed results.
I’m not sure where you live, but let’s say North Michigan.
I’d rather have my traffic dumped at Detroit or Chicago, than New York. Why? Both are major backbones that would have lower TTL to both Easy and West coast datacenters.
However it sounds like hardware for encryption is slow between your end and your VPN.
What sort of VPN client are you using? At your PC or at your router?
I’m not sure who your provider is but mine is Fios. And even though I have 300/300 Mbps, it took me a year to read the fine print. 300 Mbps speeds are only guaranteed with a wired connection.
After a little more research, the only way I could get closer to that via wireless is too change my wireless router - which I as mine is their modem/router in one like most companies these days. Bottom line is consumer level wireless routers (including the newest generation ac routers like the Nighthawk just don’t have the processing power to provide that type of throughput.
My suggestion is to install a commercial level solution - specifically PFsense as is open source, cheap to build or buy and then install quality wifi access points like ubiquiti.
If my house was wired well, I’d just install a powerful switch to my router and use Ethernet on most of my peripherals but I don’t and am stuck with wifi powering 80% of my house which is why I have 300mbps.
Sorry to ramble but my point is I totally identify with you and it sucks. But if you know what I mean about PFsense then I urge you to pull the trigger. And if you don’t, just do a little research and see if it’s something you might be interested in. I did for the same reasons as you two years ago and now that I understand certain things, I could never go back to using overpriced, underperforming consumer routers.
Configuring it around Fios’ rules was a bit of a pain but there’s a ton of info out there an once you do - my entire internet experience and performance changed. And I ended up learning a ton about networking, Linux and just so much stuff.
Anyway, good luck and I hope things work out. If you ever have any questions or whatever, feel free to pm me. Good luck
I don’t use flash-based speed test services, which are indeed notoriously inaccurate. I use this one, which is more reliable and accurate.
As well, I have tested and compared my P2P download speeds, with SSL tunneled VPN, and without.
Without a doubt my ISP is throttling my P2P traffic. And without a doubt, my ISP doesn’t recognize P2P traffic when I enable my SSL tunneled VPN, and my download rates significantly increase.