SPEED
VPN speed and performance
Honest numbers on what a VPN costs in throughput and latency, why the loss is proportionally worse on very fast lines, how to choose a server for speed rather than for the flag, and which of the usual slowdown explanations are wrong.
8 articles
Router VPN throughput and why CPU is the ceilingA router that routes a gigabit may manage 80 Mbps through a tunnel. The reason is hardware offload that encrypted traffic cannot use.
Bandwidth needed for 4K over a VPN4K needs about 25 Mbps. A tunnel costs 10 to 30 percent, so a 50 Mbps line still clears it comfortably. Buffering is usually not a bandwidth problem.
Does a VPN drain phone battery?A well-behaved tunnel costs a few percent a day. A misbehaving one can halve your battery, and the difference is almost always reconnection loops.
VPN over 5G versus Wi-FiA tunnel behaves differently on cellular: shorter NAT timeouts, IPv6-only cores, variable MTU and a radio that costs battery when it stays awake.
VPN and gaming latencyA VPN adds the round trip to the server, and nothing recovers it. When that is acceptable, when it is not, and the one case where it helps.
Why gigabit connections lose the most to a VPNA 50 Mbps line barely notices a tunnel. A gigabit line often halves. The cause is per-packet work, which makes it a hardware problem, not a protocol one.
Picking the fastest VPN serverThe fastest server is usually the nearest, but not always. How to choose by latency and load rather than by flag, in about five minutes.
How much does a VPN slow your internet?Expect ten to thirty percent on a nearby server, plus the round trip in latency. Where the loss comes from, and which parts you can recover.
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