ANSWERED Massive differences between VPN speeds on reconnection

[xaltra 0]

Bit of an odd question as things are almost working too well in some situations and it's making me suspicious. I have a setup in which I have a gluetun Docker container that establishes a connection to AirVPN via openvpn protocol. It hits a specific AirVPN server so that I can use port forwarding. I also have a qBit Docker container that is configured so that it will only use the gluetun container as its network. In addition, the qBit instance is configured so that the only interface bound to it is the tunnel that connects to the gluetun container. So in theory there is no way that there can be any leakage. With this configuration, I normally average 40 Mb/s download. It's been this way for almost a year.

However, as of the past few weeks I've noticed sometimes after an automated gluetun restart and re-negotation of the VPN, my download speeds get massively improved. I'm talking about going from 40 Mb/s to 150 Mb/s. This is still well below the passthrough downstream speeds I can get directly from my ISP without a VPN, but it's enough of a difference that it makes me concerned that something may possibly be leaking. I've tested via multiple ways such as hopping inside the Docker containers and performing curl tests to ifconfig.me, I've run tests with IPLeak (both for web traffic and torrent traffic), I've checked the IP address that trackers are reporting, I've checked gluetun logs, and everything shows that my connection is going 100% through the VPN and reporting the same public IP that I should be getting based on the AirVPN server I'm connected to. I'm not seeing any sign of leakage. However, when I get on my AirVPN dashboard and check my connection statistics, it's reporting that I'm only geting download speeds closer to the 40 Mb/s number. If I then stop all Docker containers, reboot my hardware, and bring all the Docker containers back up then the speeds suddenly drop from 150 Mb/s to 40 Mb/s.

This sounds similar to the behavior another user reported (link attached) where download speeds are actually performing much better than they normally do and more than what AirVPN is reporting. I'm just curious if anyone else is noticing similar behavior, maybe I'm just lucky. Just want to soothe the paranoid side of my mind and make sure that this isn't indicative of any tunnel misconfiguration or anything similar.

[Staff 10116]

  On 2/26/2025 at 4:32 AM, xaltra said:

I've tested via multiple ways such as hopping inside the Docker containers and performing curl tests to ifconfig.me, I've run tests with IPLeak (both for web traffic and torrent traffic), I've checked the IP address that trackers are reporting, I've checked gluetun logs, and everything shows that my connection is going 100% through the VPN and reporting the same public IP that I should be getting based on the AirVPN server I'm connected to. I'm not seeing any sign of leakage. However, when I get on my AirVPN dashboard and check my connection statistics, it's reporting that I'm only geting download speeds closer to the 40 Mb/s number.

Hello!

From your description you're just fine and there are no leaks. The suspicious connection stats are updated only every other minute or so, therefore they are not decisive. Just to stay on the safe side even more, you can consider to force Docker containers' traffic through the Gluetun container's network thus preventing any possible traffic leak outside the VPN tunnel:
https://tcpip.wtf/en/force-docker-containers-vpn-gluetun.htm

Kind regards