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bandwidth.md

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Bandwidth speeds

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You might wonder why your bandwidth is slower in certain situations.

I ran multiple tests using different clients, servers and regions to clarify all this.

Conclusions

  • The further away the VPN server is, the slower the bandwidth will be
  • Running Docker on a VM/Windows/OSX brings a serious bottleneck due to virtualization
  • The VPN protocol (VPN_TYPE=openvpn or VPN_TYPE=wireguard):
    • wireguard is almost always slower than openvpn, maybe due to server load.
    • wireguard does have a more significant impact on low power devices (+15% speeds)
  • VPN server for OpenVPN and Wireguard are often not the same even for the same location, and so have different server load
  • The speedtest server can give very different results over time
  • The difference of results from one speedtest server to another (even in the same city) can be largely different
  • Bandwidth fluctuates during the day due to other VPN clients on a particular server
  • Some VPN providers may:
    • throttle down the download bandwidth when you run a speedtest (e.g. Mullvad)
    • allocate you less bandwidth if you don't use their proprietary software
  • Docker might be a bandwidth bottleneck

Investigations

  • Running OpenVPN or Wireguard natively on Windows gives higher bandwidths than when using a container on a Linux host. This is even stranger since Wireguard is supported, since its implementation is the same one for both Gluetun and the Wireguard Windows client. My only explanation is that Docker causes a bottleneck. This should be investigated once gluetun can be run out of a container as a binary.

Testing

Setup

  • I'm based in Montreal Canada

  • My bandwidth without VPN is around 1Gbps up and down.

  • Gluetun v3.24.0 is used

  • The Mullvad VPN service provider is used

  • We test on multiple machines:

    Nickname Host OS Docker CPU CPU arch CPU virtual cores
    windows Windows Docker desktop on WSL2 AMD 5900x amd64 24
    arch Arch Linux Docker AMD 2600x amd64 12

  • We use speedtest-cli to test the bandwidth on all speedtest hosts with:

    speedtest-cli --no-upload --server <server-id>

    On Windows I use: speedtest -s <server-id>

  • We use the following Speedtest servers

    Nickname ID Name Distance to VPN server
    amsterdam 26425 ExtraIP (Amersfoort, Netherlands) 41.77 km
    montreal 4393 TELUS (Montreal, QC, Canada) 0.35 km

Results

Note: native client host means we run the Windows program without Docker.

VPN server Speedtest server Machine VPN client host Speedtest host Protocol Highest of 3 download Mbps
nl-ams-001 amsterdam arch gluetun gluetun openvpn 110
nl1-wireguard amsterdam arch gluetun gluetun wireguard 85
nl-ams-001 amsterdam windows gluetun gluetun openvpn 54
nl1-wireguard amsterdam windows gluetun gluetun wireguard 42
nl-ams-001 amsterdam windows native native openvpn 206
nl1-wireguard amsterdam windows native native wireguard 115
ca-mtr-101 montreal arch gluetun gluetun openvpn 310
ca10-wireguard montreal arch gluetun gluetun wireguard 310
ca-mtr-101 montreal windows gluetun gluetun openvpn 194
ca10-wireguard montreal windows gluetun gluetun wireguard 210
ca-mtr-101 montreal windows native native openvpn 530
ca10-wireguard montreal windows native native wireguard 512