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I setup an OpenVPN tunnel between two hosts with 50Mbit/s connection. If I test the speed of the endpoints, it's give the 50Mbit speed exactly. But when I do the same over OpenVPN connection, it's limited to 20MBit/s.

Meanwhile the VPN servers (both are rackable servers with high performance) has no significant performance issue. Under 10% CPU usage always.

What would be that setting on OpenVPN what can cause that ?

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3 Answers 3

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How are you measuring throughput?

OpenVPN only adds 69 bytes of overhead, which is less than 5% on a 1431 byte packet.

One troubleshooting step may be to see if your clients/servers are trying to send 1500 byte packets that get fragmented, which will severely degrade performance.

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    right on point. if you're sending 1500-byte packets, each one is being split and sent as two packets, dropping performance precipitously.
    – Javier
    Mar 21, 2011 at 19:03
  • A test the network speed with speedtest.net site, and with iperf. I will chech the package fragmentation, maybe this cause the problem.
    – Glendyr
    Mar 24, 2011 at 5:12
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Be sure you're using "proto udp" as tcp in tcp is known to be problematic.

Compare the throughput numbers for UDP versus TCP transport here.

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I don't think you should expect the same speed in a VPN tunnel. Since the packets have to be encrypted and decrypted it does cause some overhead.

I'm not sure if that could explain a 30Mbps drop but that can explain why you don't have 50Mbps.

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