ANSWERED Extreme WireGuard Slowdowns ~.22 Mbps - Reconnecting Resolves the Issue Temporarily

[convincewithdaydream 1]

In the past week, I have noticed that my VPN connections to AirVPN plummet in speed at random times. When this occurs, download speeds slow to less than 1 Mbps while upload speeds remain untouched, and this seems to be invariant of the geographical location of the servers I connect to. Slow speeds persist for at least several minutes after the initial slowdown. Manually reconnecting immediately fixes the speed issue.

I connect to AirVPN via WireGuard in a docker container. I always keep several VPN sessions to AirVPN running concurrently and have not observed any correlation in the time of slowdown across VPN sessions. I have not experienced any issues with another VPN provider I also connect to via WireGuard using the same docker container.

Please let me know if you have any ideas about what might be causing this issue.


Example:
Slowdown on Vulpecula
Speeds immediately after reconnecting

Edited ... by convincewithdaydream
typo

[Staff 9972]

@convincewithdaydream

Hello!

Anything relevant on the WireGuard log? Does the problem persist if you connect directly the host, without any virtualization?

Kind regards
 

[benfitita 39]

Slowdowns and such with Wireguard  are sometimes related to MTU issues. Try setting your Wireguard interface MTU to 1280 and see if that helps. 

[convincewithdaydream 1]

@Staffand @benfitita , thank you for helping me. After a lot of troubleshooting, I believe I have discovered the cause of the issue. Even though I use the same Docker image for all of my VPN connections, I use each VPN container differently. In particular, I mostly use one VPN container connected to an AirVPN server when I need a proxy. The WireGuard slowdowns seem to have been caused by my usage of Privoxy in conjunction with a low memory limit of 70 megabytes.

I resolved the issue by removing the memory cap on my VPN containers.