Very disappointing speed with Tomato as client

[bchurl 1]

I had been testing connections using a direct tunnel to one computer. In the middle of the night last night I was getting close to my full 30 Mbps speed, so I thought it would be a good time to try connecting the router and putting the whole network behind the VPN. Using an Asus NT-16, Shibby TomatoUSB. Upgraded to the latest version, erased the nvram and started from scratch. Using the router as a client I could barely get 7 Mbps. Went back to using the computer as client and it was back up to 27+. That's, what, like a 75% loss.

Anyone know why it's so bad? Any suggestions to try to fix it? (I was using the instructions on here for the setup.)

[Staff 9972]

I had been testing connections using a direct tunnel to one computer. In the middle of the night last night I was getting close to my full 30 Mbps speed, so I thought it would be a good time to try connecting the router and putting the whole network behind the VPN. Using an Asus NT-16, Shibby TomatoUSB. Upgraded to the latest version, erased the nvram and started from scratch. Using the router as a client I could barely get 7 Mbps. Went back to using the computer as client and it was back up to 27+. That's, what, like a 75% loss.

Anyone know why it's so bad? Any suggestions to try to fix it? (I was using the instructions on here for the setup.)

Hello!

This admin suspects that the CPU power of the Asus NT-16 can't handle more than 7-8 Mbit/s encrypted traffic throughput (for encryption and decryption on the fly).

Please see also this thread, pertaining to DD-WRT but probably interesting for you anyway:

https://airvpn.org/index.php?option=com_kunena&func=view&catid=3&id=6142&limit=6&limitstart=6&Itemid=142#6210

In the above thread you can also see that it is possible to configure an old PC with DD-WRT x86. The CPU power, even of an old PC, outperforms computation abilities of many routers CPU for AES-256 encryption/decryption.

Another option would be to connect a computer to an Air server and share the connection. The computer must have both an Ethernet network card and a WiFi card. The computer connects to the VPN and acts as a "gateway". All the other devices in your network that connect to the computer will have their traffic tunneled transparently (they don't need to run OpenVPN). In this way you can tunnel all the devices in your network with just one account, without suffering the performance hit due to the CPU power of your router.

Kind regards

[Baraka 32]

Very instructive thread referenced by Admin. I agree that CPU power is a bottleneck in wire-line AES-256 encryption, especially at the 480 MHz that the CPU of the RT-N16 operates at. Remember, as good as it is, it's still a consumer-level router at a bargain basement price.

bchurl, what does the CPU usage and load look like when you're operating at capacity?

What is your computer setup? What is the CPU type and clock speed?

I would recommend trying out the same setup with DD-WRT in place of Tomato. I'm guessing that you won't see any increase in throughput. If that's the case, then you can be almost positive that the CPU is the bottleneck here.

[bchurl 1]

Hello!

This admin suspects that the CPU power of the Asus NT-16 can't handle more than 7-8 Mbit/s encrypted traffic throughput (for encryption and decryption on the fly).

...

Kind regards

I was afraid it might be something like that. Here I was thinking this new router that could do tricks might be able to take some of that cpu load off of the workstations. (Come to think of it, I used to do routing in software back in the dark ages, before routers became cheap enough for me in the first place.)

I use Macs, so they do have both ethernet and wireless. I'll have to think about how I might implement your suggestions. Let's see... if I use a computer as the gateway, do I still have any use for the router?

[Staff 9972]

Hello!

This admin suspects that the CPU power of the Asus NT-16 can't handle more than 7-8 Mbit/s encrypted traffic throughput (for encryption and decryption on the fly).

...

Kind regards

I was afraid it might be something like that. Here I was thinking this new router that could do tricks might be able to take some of that cpu load off of the workstations. (Come to think of it, I used to do routing in software back in the dark ages, before routers became cheap enough for me in the first place.)

I use Macs, so they do have both ethernet and wireless. I'll have to think about how I might implement your suggestions. Let's see... if I use a computer as the gateway, do I still have any use for the router?

Hello!

Please see here:

http://lifehacker.com/283088/share-your-macs-internet-connection-wirelessly

And yes, you can still use Tomato on the router (it has tons of interesting features), except that you won't need anymore OpenVPN on it.

Kind regards