VPN Speed
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So I am in the process of building a firewall for my home, and am testing pfsense on my brothers old pc. All is working very great, but I am in doubt about vpn. I followed NordVPN Guide to setup vpn on pfsense. It's running great, I made rules to pass only 2 devices through the vpn gateway, but the speeds are not that great.
So my Internet Speed is 250 Down and 15 Up. When I run on vpn through UDP port, speeds are 8 Down and 7.5 Up with the cpu running at 12%. Through TCP it's 35 Down and 14 Down with 42% cpu. The pc currently is running proxmox and has an AMD FX-6300 processor and an I350-T2 Dual Port gigabit network card. No other vm's are running, and pfsense has only OpenVPN no other packages running apart from the default once.
-Do you think it's a cpu limitation? Even though the core is not maxed.
-If it's a cpu limitation, I have an i5 10400 NAS running, and was thinking of getting a new NAS. Is the i5 capable of running about 100mbps vpn speed?
Thanks.
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I have no idea about your i5.
I have some i3-7100U boxes (i think 2.7GHz CPU clock) , and they can do around 300Mbit/s , w AES-NI enabled.
Note: This was a performance test , so it was between 2 local machines running OpenVPN , both connected to a local 1Gb switch. (Wan).OpenVpn depends on CPU Clock , and only uses 1 core/thread.
So a Quad 2GHz will perform slower (OpenVPN vise) than a Dual 2.7GHz.Edit:
Seems a bit strange, that TCP outperforms UDP though.
What do you mean wrt. UDP port vs TCP port ?
Are we talking about the application , or the OpenVPN Connection type ?/Bingo
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What do you mean wrt. UDP port vs TCP port ?
Are we talking about the application , or the OpenVPN Connection type ?It's the OpenVPN protocol connection type. I tried both TCP and UDP.
Regarding the cpu, it has a base clock of 3.5Ghz with 4.1Ghz boost clock, but now it's 9 years old.
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i5 10400
I can run OpenVPN at 300-450 Mb/s down on an I5 7600K so it is not a CPU limitation. If you compare that to the single threaded speed of FX-6300, then that would imply it should be able to run at 57% that speed or 171 Mb/s - 256.5 Mb/s . OpenVPN is single threaded bound which is why I am comparing single threaded speeds. They also both have AES-NI
What is your RAM usage?
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95% of the time increasing the send and receive buffer fixes this
or try another server
or use a service provider better than Nordvpn (just my opinion)
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I'll try some new servers or different location and different packets. On my pc if i use their windows application i get up to 180mbps and rarely 200's. So i don't think its a service provider issue, but if packets and other servers won't fix the issue. I'll try another provider for sure.
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What is your RAM usage?
I have 3GB assigned to pfsense and it stays at 2.45GB used (approx 82%). no changes when I test vpn speed.
The fact that such a slow speed has you use so much RAM makes me wonder if it is a RAM capacity issue. I know higher speeds need more RAM. That said, that does seem like a lot of RAM being used for that much speed. You can try giving it more RAM. I wonder if this is the issue because I have literally seen old wireless routers completely cut out when they try to pull bandwidth to fast. I assumed it was a lack of RAM to run the connection.
Also, what is your RAM speed?
