Application performance

[frogcity]

2.0.1-RELEASE (amd64)
built on Mon Dec 12 18:43:51 EST 2011
FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE-p6

You are on the latest version.
Platform pfSense
CPU Type Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz
Current: MHz, Max: 3301 MHz
4 Gb ram.

Set up openvpn on this box. I have only one client(win 7x64) connecting. Everything appears to be working correctly. Outlook to Exchange server connects fine. I have access to all servers and shares on the lan. Performance is poor. opening docs on the file servers takes quite a bit longer to execute. at least a 10 to 1 difference in time. I have done speed tests and have come to the conclusion that it is specific to the openvpn connection. What can I do to increase performance?

[marvosa]

Well, there are several factors in play, but lets get some of the obvious ones out of the way:

1.  How fast is the connection on the server side?
2.  How fast is the connection on the client side?
3.  How big is the file you are trying to open?

[Cry Havok]

Are you using a TCP or UDP VPN? UDP will generally perform better, but the OpenVPN documentation covers a lot of what you need to know.

[cmb]

Opening files on Windows file servers gets exponentially slower as latency increases. To the point where it's painful to even browse a file share at 40-50 ms typical latency over a VPN. Just an inherent problem in the protocol. SMBv2 makes that far more efficient so it performs more reasonably over higher latency connections, if you have all 2008 or newer servers and Vista or newer clients it should use v2.

[frogcity]

Thanks for all the responses. I think that CMB hit it on the head. Preliminary testing gave me a gut feeling about the smb protocol. I had devised a set of tests to prove that the problem was with that, but never got a chance to implement them. I had to put the project on hold until I finish putting out some other fires….just not sure when that will be....At least now, I have a direction to get started in...