openVPN vs L2TP - speed with router

[kncar77]

Hi.

I've had VPN up and running on my Linksys E4200 since a couple of year back. I'm located in the middle east but connects through VPN servers in northern Europe.
I used strongVPN for a year, swapped to HMA and am now with privatevpn.com
The only real issue I've had is a speed issue with openVPN (around 2,5 Mbit) which I always assumed to be lack of CPU power on the E4200. So I bought a ASUS RT-AC68U..
If I do a speed test (not using VPN) to a server in my home town in Europe I get pretty much full ISP speed (16/1Mbit) and the ping is around 160ms. But with openVPN in the router, testing towards the same server, I only get around 5/0.8Mbit, ping roughly same 160-165ms. Ok, that's 100% faster than with the E4200 but still..?!

Now what surprises me is if I connect with L2TP to the same VPN server in the WAN setup of the router I get very close to full speed (15.5Mb/1M) testing against the same EU server as before.
I tested L2TP with the E4200 and the same thing, speed now about 9Mbit vs 2,5Mbit previously with openVPN.

To rule out firmware problems, the RT-AC68U get the same openVPN speed regardless if using official ASUS, merlin firmware or Tomato (shibby's latest 1.25)

Isn't openVPN suppose to be less overhead and faster protocol than L2TP? Or maybe openVPN doesn't handle connections with relatively high ping?

Any inputs?

Thanks,
Knut

 

[CaptainSTX]

Have you tried running your VPN provider's client software on your PC?

By doing this you will have a good approximation of the maximum rate your VPN provider can support consistently. Then the rule of thumb would be that by running your VPN on a SOHO router you should get approximately 60% of that speed.

Not all VPN providers are equal. I never got decent speeds using HMA either on a PC or router. StrongVPN was excellent for several years then all of a sudden their speeds dropped. Currently using Astrill.

While some people claim that PPTP is faster I have always had better results with OpenVPN. Have tried L2TP and didn't see any improvement in speed. L2TP isn't universally supported on all devices or services so your choice comes down to PPTP (not secure ) or OpenVPN.

If maximum bandwidth is important to you then you will need to run your VPN on a device with more processing power than a router. I use a hardware VPN accelerator and normally get at least 95% of my subscribed bandwidth when connected using a VPN.

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4173164589

 

[netware5]

What protocol did you used for OpenVPN tunnel? TCP or UDP? If you use OpenVPN over TCP you should know that the overall speed through the tunnel significantly depends on the ISP UPLOAD speed also which seems to be very low in your case (1Mbit/s). You may try OpenVPN over UDP to see if there is a difference. L2TP tunneling is over UDP only.

Other consideration is the encryption - I am not an expert in L2TP but most probably it uses much less CPU power for crypto tasks than the L2TP.