Recently I upgraded my remote office connection to 100Mbps (cable) and spent almost a month dealing with slow downloads over an openVPN client connection. Uploads were fine (maxing out the pipe) but downloads were 12-20 Mbps at best and fluctuating like crazy. TCP client mode actually performed better than UDP so I knew something was wrong. After making sure my MSS/MTU was fine and UDP iperf tests were able to max out my connection (without the VPN, proving my ISP wasn’t throttling UDP), the following config on the server side is what ended up fixing it:
sndbuf 0;
rcvbuf 0;
push "sndbuf 393216";
push "rcvbuf 393216";I now get 105 Mbps downloads on my openVPN connection (115 without VPN). Turns out the default buffers are just too small for high speed tunnels. Who would have known.
My husband is a programmer, so he will need this article to finish his job project.