What are some recommended OpenVPN directives to use?

[bidasci 3]

I am wondering from the community what kind of custom OpenVPN dirrectives you use? I am not looking for anything specific but hopefully this will help my speed because no matter what VPN server I connect to (canada, usa, etc) my speed drops by half. Thank you!

[OpenSourcerer 1441]

Optimizational relevance in my configs bear these three:

fast-io
rcvbuf 524288
sndbuf 524288

Note that --fast-io has no effect on Windows.
The receive and send buffers are 512K and may improve performance that way. The Windows standard on Win8, for example, is 64K receive and 8K send, if I remember correctly, so adjusting these may really help.

Apart from that, I remove the 128/192 bit AES ciphers. What you could try is using CHACHA20-POLY1305 here, but I think it won't help your throughput at all on a PC. It could help on Android or routers, though.

data-ciphers AES-256-GCM

.

[Snowsuit8087 4]

In addition to what OpenSourcerer said, I also use:

tls-version-min 1.3

It won't change speeds, but adds security. 

I would also change between the standard UDP configuration to potentially TCP or SSL/SSH > TCP tunnels depending on how friendly your ISP is to VPN traffic. I personally get better throughput on WireGuard on every device I use, so it's worth a shot.

[Air4141841 25]

pull-filter ignore "ifconfig-ipv6 ";
pull-filter ignore "route-ipv6 ";
remote-cert-tls server;
sndbuf 524288;
rcvbuf 524288;
allow-compression asym;
remote us3.vpn.airdns.org 443;

is what I use for my tunnels..

I have a 500Mb symmetrical fiber line.   with Airvpn I never get over 110Mb FYI