Best Merlin Firmware for RT-AC3100 and OpenVPN using PureVPN ??

[sjf99]

I'm fighting through the issues with my new (still returnable) RT-AC3100. 5ghz radio turning off... Time randomly changing to July, etc... BUT, I'm running an OpenVPN client w/ PureVPN. I need/want to use Merlin because I only want certain devices to go thru the VPN (2 FireTV devices). I had 380.65_4 on my first 3100, which I returned because of the 5ghz problem. This new one did it within an hour of setting it up. It's currently running 380.65_2. I have HW Version A5 BTW. I left the stock FW on the new just to quickly test and seemed a lot snappier before putting Merlin on it. I did a reset through the firmware and then with the reset button before installing Merlin. It sometimes seems to lag a little between admin screens. I believe I kept getting "downloading Proxy infomation" or something about proxy between pages. I had the RT-AC1900 (non-P) before this and it seemed like the OpenVPN overhead bogged it down quite a bit. The 1.4ghz CPU did seem to help over 1ghz CPU of the 1900. The 5ghz signal appears to be much better with the 3100 as well. Only my Galaxy S7 appears to support Mu-MIMO although the Fire TV's are supposed to support it as well. My speeds thru the VPN range from 9-36Mbps on a 100 Mbps cable service. They improved a lot by changing the encryption to 128 bit from 256. PureVPN only supported port 53 over UDP until recently. I couldn't get over 1Mbps with that connection. Once I changed to ports to somewhere in the 5500-55000 range it got a lot better. My ISP claims to not be blocking port 53 or throttling anything (yeah sure). Using TCP:80 the speeds were about 9-28Mbps.

So my questions are:
What is the most stable, OpenVPN friendly version of Merlin?
What do you guys set your Beacon Interval to? Does it affect performance much by increasing it?
Are you disabling Airtime Fairness?
Does disabling the Firewall help?
I read to enable IGMP Snooping ??
Are there any tweaks I can try within the OpenVPN settings, especially custom settings???

I can upload screen shots of the settings if that would be useful.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

And of course a big thank you to RMerlin and Co. for all the hard work.

 

[Xentrk]

I found some nuances with OpenVPN in 380.65 when compared to 380.64. With 380.65, OpenVPN 2.4 was introduced. It did create a learning curve for many of us. But requests for help appear to have gone down recently.

This thread contains links to the guide I put together for TorGuard, which will explain what those nuances were and the settings to fix them:

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/r...65-is-now-available.37295/page-30#post-315484

 

[ignade82]

I still have purevpn account and the same router. I will test tonight.
Could you please tell where do you connect from and to which server s purevpn.
I have understood you change the port from 53 to 50000 and was it better? 50mbit?

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

 

[sjf99]

I still have purevpn account and the same router. I will test tonight.
Could you please tell where do you connect from and to which server s purevpn.
I have understood you change the port from 53 to 50000 and was it better? 50mbit?

Sent from my LG-H815 using Tapatalk

I connect to the UDP NJ-US server from Northern NJ. I'm still playing with it but got UDP to work somewhat. I think I'm using port 8000 at the moment but won't know for sure until I get home. My couple of speed tests varied from 9-30-45-ish Mbps. I also set the fallback Cipher to AES-128-CBC which I think helped from AES-256-CBC. I think depending on the port you use it may or may not like that.