Raspberry PI 2 - OpenVPN - Speed(?)

Hardware Hub Networking
1

What speeds can I expect if I setup a Raspberry Pi 2 as a vpn router (OpenVPN) at my home network?

Modem > Asus wireless router > Raspberry PI 2 OpenVPN > clients

Running OpenVPN on my desktop computer gives me 50Mbits and that is what my broadband speed is. Running OpenVPN on my Asus RT-AC66U gives me 12Mbits.

Will the Raspberry PI 2 give me better speeds, or must I buy a new router with better CPU to handle the encryption? Like the new Netgear R7500 Nighthawk X4 AC2350?

I hope someone here has any experience with stuff like this.

2

I would expect the RPi 2 to give better speeds than your router because it has more powerful hardware. But the RPi 2 (and all other RPis) has two big bottlenecks:

1) The ethernet on all the RPis is 100Mbps maximum.
2) The USB ports and the ethernet are on the same bus connected to the CPU of the RPi and thus have to share the bandwidth, this means that you'll probably never get the 100Mbps that the ethernet port can handle.

So my short conclusion is that you'll probably get better speeds than your router with a RPi 2, but not the best speeds.

I have to note that I have never did anything with VPNs or OpenVPN, so I'm not sure if you can actually run it on a Raspberry Pi.

1 Like
3

I think 20-25mbit would be realistic, but this is pure speculation. It will not fill a 50 mbit line since atoms have difficulty achieving that.

4

I assume that you mean the Intel Atom CPUs, but the RPi 2 doesn't run an Atom processor. The RPi 2 uses the Broadcom BCM2836, which is a Quad Core ARMv7 CPU and runs at 900MHz stock on the RPi.

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I know hence I say 20-25 mbit/s realistically as an Intel Atom has trouble achieving 50 mbit/s and an Atom has more power than an RPi 2.

6

Oh okay, that makes sense.

7

The Raspberry PI 2 uses a Broadcom BCM2836 yes. Not a Atom processor.

If you say that I might get 25mbit out of a Raspberry PI, what could I do then, to get better speeds through OpenVPN? I do not want a solution to run a OpenVPN client on every client, even though this undoubtedly gives the best speed, is not the best practice solution I am looking for. I want a gateway/router/wlan to give me the best OpenVPN speed. The new Netgear hardware gave me a hope, but it seems that it is not good enough for a 50mbit broadband speed using OpenVPN? Raspberry PI is undoubtedly the better solution for this...

8

The only way to get high speed through OpenVPN is using a beefier machine. something like an Intel c1037u nuc. Braswell Nuc's should be able to get it too.
No consumer router will be able to handle 50 mbit with OpenVPN it's that simple.

9

If you have a little more space and some computer building experience, a build based on the AMD AM1 platform with an AMD Athlon 5350 or AMD Athlon 5150 might also be a good and relatively cheap option. I'm not sure how well these perform in comparison to the Intel nucs but the AMD AM1 motherboards and CPUs are really cheap, you can get the best AM1 cpu, the AMD Athlon 5350, and a AM1 motherboard for around 80 euro's where I live (the Netherlands).

I'm not sure how the Athlon 5350 performs in comparison to the nuc you suggested, but it might be worth checking out.