I was doing some experiments with my internet download speed with and without PIA VPN. I have a gigabit connection to my house. When I do a speed test over the VPN I get roughly 100 Mbps. When I do the speed test not on the VPN I am getting around 750 Mbps. I was thinking these speeds should be close to the same? I am running PfSense for my router. During both downloads the CPU usage goes to about 40% but is perhaps a bit lower whilst on the VPN than without. Is this reduction in speed due to my router not having sufficient power? Surely the bandwidth from PIA isn’t the limitation. I appreciate any insights you kind folks can provide.
Nope, that seems pretty normal. This is one reason you dont put all your network traffic over a VPN and also why you constantly see posts about people trying to improve their VPN speed.
ISPs usually allow uncapped speed to speedtest.net when they detect it to bloat/fudge their numbers. Through a VPN, you get your real ISP speed.
No.
It’s not just PIA or your ISP, it’s anything and everything on the internet to anything and everything else on the internet.
If it takes you e.g. 15 hops to get to somewhere, all it takes is one link in between those hops to be congested, and you’re not going to get the bandwidth and/or latency you may be hoping for.
If you add PIA, and it takes you 5 hops to get to PIA that’s 5 more places where things can go wrong.
And on top of that, if you’re using OpenVPN, then PIA might not have the ability to decrypt your connection to them, as quickly as you’re hoping for.
The amount of bandwidth or throughput you can get is really hard to predict and really expensive to guarantee. And, when you’re in the ISP business or a datacenter business, buying bandwidth and connectivity and managing traffic and costs and purchasing is hard work. As a general rule, you don’t want to spend more time and energy and effort and money than you absolutely need to. - since most people won’t notice the difference, and it’s something that most people don’t appreciate most of the time.
My bet, you’re using OpenVPN with PIA, and PIA is too cheap to invest into fancy TLS accelerator infrastructure, or custom OpenVPN code needed to utilize those accelerators server side, and are just burning a ton of CPU hoping most people are happy with 100Mbps or 200Mbps, or 50 Mbps if they’re unlucky.
Maybe try Wireguard with PIA - it’s easier to balance across cores, and less likely you’ll run into contention at a particular endpoint.
1 Like