Help with VPN speeds

AndyCroft1982 · 22 Jan 2017 at 12:07

I have recently bought a Asus RT-n66U so i could instal a vpn on to it so we can watch american netflix and get round various other geo locks. I started with expressvpn as its supposed to be the "fastest". Everything i tried i could only get 5mb download (im with virgin 200mb line) so i thought i would try NordVpn. Exactly the same thing. My virgin superhub 2 is in modem mode.

Has anyone else had these issues and managed to sort them ?

neodude · 22 Jan 2017 at 12:56

The hardware of consumer grade routers is really not up to the task of handling full speed VPN traffic. Not saying that this is definitely the issue, but I noticed a significant increase in VPN speeds when replacing my ASUS router with pfSense.

AndyCroft1982 · 22 Jan 2017 at 13:12

I have just done a speed test whilst watching how much cpu/ram my router is using, max it went up to cpu was 50% and ram stayed at 23%

bremen1874 · 22 Jan 2017 at 13:35

Have you tried connecting to the VPN from the client device rather than the router for comparison?

troops · 22 Jan 2017 at 15:13

I had similar with a wndr4500 which has the same cpu, sure i got close to 10mbit tho.

AndyCroft1982 · 22 Jan 2017 at 15:17

Hmm you guys might be right about the cpu on router. Tried the same server both router side then pc side. There was defiantly a difference. The coy on router also shot up to 93% when router side VPN was downloading at 15mb. Damn router cost me £70 as well lol. Wifi is defiantly stronger in the house though. I only want to use it really so we can watch non geo locked things. Next project then is a pf sense router / nas drive.

neodude · 22 Jan 2017 at 15:21

You won't be disappointed with pfSense.

AndyCroft1982 · 22 Jan 2017 at 20:51

What are you running it on ? I want something low power on 24/7 to act as a router and plex server. Would only be to stream to 4 TVs in the house. I doubt they would all be streaming at the same time either.

Rainmaker · 22 Jan 2017 at 21:45

It's definitely the router being crud. OpenVPN is a very CPU intensive process, and it's single-threaded. That means your dual core (or above) CPU will not be used to the max, as it will only ever max a single core with a single thread. Our pfSense box doesn't have issues, but any consumer router will. They (consumer routers) don't have proper x86/x64 CPUs, they have little ARM/MIPS units.

APM · 22 Jan 2017 at 22:54

I ran a speedtest for an Air VPN client connection on a Windows 10 pc ,UK to Arizona,the pther day.
Came back at just under 15Mbps out of a 50Mbps ISP speed which wasn't so bad.

parityboy · 23 Jan 2017 at 01:23

AndyCroft1982 said:
What are you running it on ? I want something low power on 24/7 to act as a router and plex server. Would only be to stream to 4 TVs in the house. I doubt they would all be streaming at the same time either.

Here might be a good starting point. I can't really help you with hardware because I run mine in a VM and my connection is only 8/1. However I would say to get something with AES-NI (or the AMD equivalent).

ScoobyDoo · 23 Jan 2017 at 12:36

What not use a Raspberry PI as the VPN router, ive been running my VPN via my PI for over 12 months.

The max the PI will give you is about 22mb compared to 5mb running on your router but this is more than enough for streaming.

Have a look at this

https://gist.github.com/superjamie/ac55b6d2c080582a3e64

AndyCroft1982 · 23 Jan 2017 at 13:08

ScoobyDoo said:
What not use a Raspberry PI as the VPN router, ive been running my VPN via my PI for over 12 months.

The max the PI will give you is about 22mb compared to 5mb running on your router but this is more than enough for streaming.

Have a look at this

https://gist.github.com/superjamie/ac55b6d2c080582a3e64

great idea, i never thought of using a pi. Do you use it to watch american netflix ?

thenewoc · 23 Jan 2017 at 13:09

That is using OpenVPN which I think is slower than L2TP over IPSec.

You could use something like an Odroid C2 instead of the Pi which should give a bit more performance.

Some recent details of someone doing something similar with the Pi can be found here.

https://ritazh.com/setup-your-own-l2tp-vpn-server-with-raspberry-pi-170d3d4df04c#.xxatgfdix

EDIT:
The other option which I'm looking at is going down the Ubiquiti hardware route and having their USG router and separate wireless access points. The router has L2TP over IPsec option for remote user VPN and can also run a radius server. Ubiquiti forum user claims to get aprox 38 Mbps performance.

gemlover · 24 Jan 2017 at 08:00

AndyCroft1982 said:
I have recently bought a Asus RT-n66U so i could instal a vpn on to it so we can watch american netflix and get round various other geo locks. I started with expressvpn as its supposed to be the "fastest". Everything i tried i could only get 5mb download (im with virgin 200mb line) so i thought i would try NordVpn. Exactly the same thing. My virgin superhub 2 is in modem mode.

Has anyone else had these issues and managed to sort them ?

try purevpn. I think you will get good speed with it as they claimed to be the fastest vpn provider....

AndyCroft1982 · 24 Jan 2017 at 08:49

I've tried expressvpn again but using their L2TP service. Got up to 50mb download through my router which I can cope with. I'm now thinking I want to try and setup guest ssid's to run through the vpn whilst the original ones run through the isp so I get full speed. Have any of you tried this and does it work using the one router ? I think I'm still going to need some sort of pfsense system or pi in the future, I'm just curious and find it exciting as I'm just getting into this networking for the first time lol

neodude · 24 Jan 2017 at 09:19

AndyCroft1982 said:
What are you running it on ? I want something low power on 24/7 to act as a router and plex server. Would only be to stream to 4 TVs in the house. I doubt they would all be streaming at the same time either.

I run pfSense as a VM within my UnRaid server. Specs in my sig.

AndyCroft1982 · 24 Jan 2017 at 10:24

neodude said:
I run pfSense as a VM within my UnRaid server. Specs in my sig.

Thanks for that, i have just looked up UnRaid and that looks perfect for what i want to achieve. It feels like opening pandora's box looking into network solutions lol

gemlover said:
try purevpn. I think you will get good speed with it as they claimed to be the fastest vpn provider....

I have just signed up to their trial, i spoke to them online for their netflix server. I was only getting 5mb download through PPTP, i will keep trying but compared to ExpressVPN L2TP speed of 40-50mb download, i think i will let the trial expire. PureVPN are a lot cheaper though and will come back to them when i eventually build a pfsense system.

Great advice from everyone so far, i never knew there was so much to learn about VPNs which has led onto learning about pfsense, unraid, ubuntu etc etc. It feels like a minefield haha

ScoobyDoo · 25 Jan 2017 at 13:26

AndyCroft1982 said:
great idea, i never thought of using a pi. Do you use it to watch american netflix ?

It works great for this

Simon42 · 25 Jan 2017 at 14:32

What are your single versus multiple connection speeds like with your VM 200 service, have you done a thinkbroadband or similar test that shows both?

The reason is some VM customers get much less on a single thread connection than when using multiple and that affects services and applications that cannot use multiple connections concurrently.