I thought a r7000 could get 50Mbits?

anonydudeanonydude
in Other Devices VPN Setup
I'm on a 300/100 connection.

Desktop app gets 50/80. Open VPN on Netgear R7000 router with DD-WRT gets 11/30.

I'm quite satisfied with the performance of the desktop app.
Why is the router performance so poor?  11Mbits down is unsatisfactory for my needs.  Bought this router based on information from these forums that it can reach 50Mbits download.  I set it up exactly as the guides describe.   Any tips to get this to perform as others have described.  Might try overclocking the router CPU to see if that gets me anywhere.   But reports from others say the R7000 at stock should do 50Mbits.

Any suggestions are welcome! Thanks!

Comments

  • anonydudeanonydude
    edited January 2017
    I tried overclocking from 1000mhz to 1200mhz.  My download speeds remain and 11Mbits.  If I was CPU bound, I thought I would see about a 20% improvement.

    Currently on AES 128 port 1198 per PIAs guide.  Tried moving to Blowfish CBC port 1194, but no noticable difference.
  • itsmefloralucaitsmefloraluca
    Here are some links that may help you.
    Jump to Performance - As of 2014, the Netgear R7000 is one of the fastest (in CPU terms) ... Whilst the router is fast, potential users should be aware that IPv4 NAT ... R7000 will not give you the fullline speed you'll get from your modem,
    Through the router though, we only get about 50 Mbps down. ... DDWRT is causing this, and to fix you need to flash back to Netgear's firmware. ... This is not a DD-WRT problem, turn off QoS and your speeds should change to full ... but if you want full speed internet, dont setup QoS unless you know how to ...





  • anonydudeanonydude
    edited January 2017
    Thanks for the links.  I've read through everything in the links, but nothing seems relevant to my issue.

    My R7000 running DD-WRT is faster than I could ask for when its not configured to OpenVPN to PIA. 300Mbits down 100Mbits up, which is exactly my line speed.  I do not use QOS, and the router seems to be working great.
    When I use a windows computer and the desktop PIA app (still behind the R7000), I my speeds drop to 50Mbits down, 80Mbits up.  This is still more than adequate.

    When I configure my R7000 with DD-WRT to OpenVPN to PIA.  Speeds are 11Mbits Down, 30Mbits up.  This upload is fine with me but the download is terrible.   Overclocking seems to have no affect on the download speed.  My speeds are much lower than other users here have posted with the same hardware.  I'm expecting the CPU on R7000 to hold me back and be worse than the desktop app, but 11Mbits down is really, really sub-par.   I've moved between blowfish cbc and AES 128, the download speed remains capped at 11Mbits.  It's interesting to me that I can get 30Mbits up, this sort of indicates to me that the R7000 CPU can handle encryption at atleast that speed, so why is download only 11Mbits?  Overclocking does nothing to the download speed, another indicator that it is not CPU.

    Many of the links you posted either about a DD-WRT performance issue that limits you to ~400Mbits second, certainly not my issue.   Some links talk about wifi speeds, my tests are exclusive to the wired gigabit port.  Other links talk about encryption load on the CPU, one guy went from 10Mbits to 25Mbits by switching from blowfish to aes 128, as I mentioned, I see no difference in download speed switching between the two.

    Really appreciate the help,  unfortunately I haven't found a silver bullet that will solve my issue.

    All I can think is PIA servers is throttling OpenVPN connections on the download side, while the desktop clients are getting a better pipe.
  • thingsandstuffthingsandstuff
    I'm using OpenVPN on an Asus RT-AC68u (on the merlin f/w) and get ~25mbps down. I think it has a similar CPU, dual-core 1Ghz.

    Maybe if you post the settings your are using for openvpn somebody can help?
  • anonydudeanonydude
    OK, new info here.  Did some speed testing using a well seeded official torrent of a linux distro.  Finding I'm getting about 25Mbps down via Open VPN on the R7000.  Speedtest.net is showing me 11Mbps no matter what server I connect to.   I'm not sure why a torrent would perform better than speedtest.net.  What's interesting is when using the desktop app, I get 50Mbits on torrents and 50Mbits on Speedtest.   If I use openvpn on the R7000 I get 25Mbits on torrents and only 11Mbits on speedtest.

    Will post my Openvpn config shortly.
  • anonydudeanonydude
    edited January 2017

    ca /tmp/openvpncl/ca.crt management 127.0.0.1 16 management-log-cache 100 verb 3 mute 3 syslog writepid /var/run/openvpncl.pid client resolv-retry infinite nobind persist-key persist-tun script-security 2 dev tun1 proto udp cipher aes-128-cbc auth sha1 auth-user-pass /tmp/openvpncl/credentials remote ca-toronto.privateinternetaccess.com 1198 comp-lzo yes tun-mtu 1500 mtu-disc yes fast-io tun-ipv6 persist-key persist-tun tls-client remote-cert-tls server
  • anonydudeanonydude
    edited January 2017
    OK folks I've tweaked my "additional lines" config and got a big difference in my speedtests.  Speedtest.net improved from 11Mbps Download to 25Mbps download.   Torrents remain at 25Mbps, so the change had no affect on torrent downloads, but more than doubled my speedtest.net performance.

    my original "additional lines"
    persist-key
    persist-tun
    tls-client
    remote-cert-tls server

    My new "additional lines"
    persist-key
    persist-tun
    tls-client
    remote-cert-tls server
    verb 1
    fast-io
    sndbuf 524288
    rcvbuf 524288
    comp-lzo yes
    comp-noadapt

    I'm not getting the promised 50Mbps, but this is a massive improvement!
  • abir1909abir1909
    Hey anonydude, did you ever manage to get the 50MB? i am at the exact situation you described. thanks
  • choderchoder
    I only get 17MB down.  
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User]
    @anonydude, I suspect the options in your additional config that are increasing your speed are these: 

    fast-io
    sndbuf 524288
    rcvbuf 524288

    fast-io improves CPU effciency by 5-10% on non-Windows systems, but it will only help if you're connecting using UDP. It might help noticeably on the R7000, but my guess is that increasing the buffer value is doing more good for you in this instance. 

    OpenVPN defaults to a buffer value of 65536 bytes, which was the ultimate result of some cross-platform buffer size issues very early on in the prococol's development. While this was fine in 2004, it is quite low by modern standards and increasing send/receive buffer values can provide much better speeds. The optimal value depends on your operating system and latency to the server you're connecting to — you might try starting out around 300000 and experimenting with higher values from there.
  • kendaljakendalja
    I am seeing 35Mbps DL and 12Mbps through my R7000
  • bluecrabbbluecrabb
    Anonydude and PIAColleen you guys are awesome. Made the changes to my config as Colleen advised, and dl speeds went from 25 to 38 Mbps, upload remained unchanged at close to 35 Mbps. Started buffers out at 384000, will stay put and increase if stability allows. Otherwise R7000 handling it much better...
  • [Deleted User][Deleted User]
    @bluecrabb glad to hear this helped! I'm interested to see if you'll get any substantial increase pushing the buffer values higher.

  • anotherbadanotherbad
    @PIAColleen
    These commands worked SO well in the additional config section of dd-wrt on a Netgear R7000P. Going to try them on my other boxes. 30 mbit down --> 50/60 mbit down. Thank you!

    fast-io
    sndbuf 524288
    rcvbuf 524288


  • [Deleted User][Deleted User]
    @anotherbad, I'm really glad to hear this helped! Increasing the send/receive buffer values seems to really improve speeds on the R7000 specifically :)
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