AITA for VPN speeds?
AITA for VPN speeds?
Quick question for everyone, mostly want to know if my IT dept. is full of crap... Our current internet speeds via speedtest.org - VPN off - 617 Mb/s VPN on - 23 Mb/s Now, I'm no network specialist, yet, but I feel like a 96% drop in speed is a bit extreme for a VPN (Sophos). I have raised my concern to IT, as we are working from a remote annex building, so we have to be on the VPN in order to access our server, and his response is "that's normal for VPNs." I feel like all the times I have used a VPN in the past for personal use, it has never been THAT big of a knock on my speeds, maybe I'm wrong though. Just seems extreme. Now for the question - Am I totally wrong and expect too much from our VPN, or is he wrong and just doesn't want to admit that he has a crap provider?
There may be some cost from overheads above, but there could also be a cost from CPU usage on the server itself. If it handles many clients, this can become noticeable. I’m able to support 224Mbit to my VPS with VPN over UDP without any adjustments. The issue really arises when more clients join, particularly with OpenVPN which is CPU-intensive and single-threaded. Therefore, both client and server CPU performance are crucial for maintaining speed. That’s why Wireguard is now widely praised for reducing this bottleneck.
I'm really looking forward to 100, even 75 would be triple our present pace. Given our IT team's expertise, I expect most remote traffic to pass through our main server in HQ, then sent to office servers across various cities. It seems likely that when I access a folder on the Charlotte server, it goes via the central VPN to Pittsburgh, back to Charlotte, and then reversed for delivery—rather than a straight link from me to VPN to Charlotte.
TCP isn't ideal for a VPN since it can lead to TCP over TCP issues. This causes both the VPN connections and the data inside them to compete for bandwidth, reducing performance.
Indeed, all my VPNs are on my router so they are only used as a back-door into my VPS servers so I don't have to leave the admin portals open to the public Internet. I mean I really don't want DNS going over the VPN as I need local lookups to work and its just adding latency for no good reason.