Hello selfhosters,
I recently moved to a new place with faster internet (320/130 Mbps) and now I see that VPN is limiting my torrent speed.
I was testing multiple AirVPN (wireguard) servers and I’m getting 80-120 Mbps on speedtest-cli, but in torrents it goes bit higher to about 180-200 Mbps. I usually use it trought gluetun container, but was also testing with eddie-cli and I get pretty much the same results.
I was reading that people get 600 Mbps and even 1+ Gbps on AirVPN. What is your experience? If this is AirVPN limit, what would you suggest as alternative with port forwarding to saturate my bandwidth? I can live with these speeds, just want to check if there is better alternative or something missconfigured on my side.
Cheers
VPN limiting your bandwidth? Sounds like a CPU issue. You’ll be surprised how much CPU overhead it takes to encrypt and decrypt traffic at such high speeds.
Yeah this seems right. My CPU utilization goes to 100% during speedtest and I have celeron 😆 Thank you!
While this is conclusively stoned as “cpu” issues, in case anyone else finds this thread…
While your isp can’t read the data over the VPN, they CAN see that you’re using a VPN and intentionally slow down your connection with traffic shaping because you’re putting so much data through the vpn.
Oh good to know
Bro if you need rediculous speeds like that get a seed box. 200+ is more than enough and you’ll likely cap out on CPU/thread utilization after that.
I don’t need, but wasn’t sure am I using full capacity of what I’m paying for and want to learn more. This is my hobby, I enjoy setting up things more than using the server lol edit: and yeah feels like CPU capped
I enjoy setting up things more than using the server lol
Also me in life, in games… I like min-maxing, making it as efficient as things will allow.
So I asked chatgpt what professions would be best for a person like that and from the 10 answers it spat out, surprise surprise, I’ve worked as 2 out of the top 3.
Use Wireguard instead of OpenVPN.
I am, but as others said I think my CPU cant handle it
You mentioned that your cpu is getting maxed out on wireguard. That makes a lot of sense since it’s generally not hardware accelerated, old low end CPUs could struggle here.
What choices do you have for protocols with your VPN software?
Try AES128 UDP mode with openVPN.
I want to use glueten container, but I’m flexible about everything else. I can try openVPN server, but not sure what AES128 means (I know its some kind of encryption, but don’t know how to use that in my case). There are many different servers to chose, Ill try few with UDP openVPN. thanks
Ok in that case. The goal is to use a cipher suite that works well on your device that is still secure. AES is accelerated on most processors these days. But you’ll want to confirm that by looking up your specific cpu (both host and client machines!) and checking for AES acceleration.
AES-128-GCM would be my suggestion.
UDP mode provides less overhead, so it should be faster for you.
Alternatively you could use IPsec instead of openvpn but that’s a chore to configure. But it has the benefit of being free and being natively supported by many devices.
You would still want to configure an appropriate cipher suite that’s fast and secure.
My CPU (g3930) supports Intel AES New Instructions if thats it. Ill look more into it, thank you
Yeah give that a go. Glad to help 🙂
