last year when i started using openwrt i configured an interface to use my mullvad vpn connection for all traffic. The interface worked fine and i was getting my advertised speed from my isp (500Mbps), however, after the start of the year the speeds randomly started dropping to 10Mbps while this interface is active.
I tried the obvious steps that i found in other threads such as trying different vpn servers, changing MTU values, and enabling hardware offloading. Two weeks ago when i first had this issue i thought i had fixed it by enabling hardware offloading in the firewall settings but i guess that wasn't the actual fix because now I am having the same issue.
Disabling the wireguard interface results in normal speeds (no vpn)
Changing vpn server does not fix the issue (each server results in 10Mbps)
Using mobile data on my phone and testing the same vpn servers results in NORMAL speeds
Setting MTU to 1280 (as per mullvads recommendation) in the interface does not fix the speed
Enabling hardware offloading does not fix the speed
Disabling the wireguard interface on openwrt and using the mullvad vpn app on my desktop still results in 10Mbps
The last point makes me think it was an issue with the mullvad itself, but when I do the test on my phone with the mullvad app on mobile data, the speeds are fine...
Im not really sure where to go from here, any help is appreciated.
That sounds like traffic management on your providers part. Your wg gets identified as torrent and slowed down.
2nd and last list item kind of confirms misidentification
hardware offload is of no help, it is for weak routers that can not forward at wire speed using CPU
It’s a theory, but run a wget from the tele2 speed server http://speedtest.tele2.net/ both with and without VPN. Watch your CPU when you do - top or htop will work fine.
It’s not in your provider’s interest to throttle you, if only for bandwidth.
The output was virtually the same with the vpn turned off, however, the speed of the wget download did not change when i turned the vpn on/off. Not sure how relevant that is, but does seem odd. I did do a normal speedtest.net run again after turning the vpn off and speeds were normal.
UPDATE: not solved, did some more troubleshooting. Wired my laptop to my ISP modem and did a test with no vpn connection, got the advertised speed of 500Mbps down. Once i turned on the vpn connection dropped again to 10Mbps. So definitely starting to look more like an isp/vpn provider issue than an openwrt one.
