Yesterday I got a VPS as a dedicated machine for OpenVPN, I set it up and ran a speed test today, what I saw astonished me:
With VPN:
Without VPN:
The VPN is situated in another country, on a different provider.
As expected the latency is slightly higher on the VPN, but I never expected the download speed via the VPN to be just below double that of my normal standard non-VPN connection. The upload speed is to be expected since I would've thought it'd be easier for my ISP to throttle that than downloads.
I've always thought that a VPN connection will always have a lower speed than that of the normal connection, but clearly I'm incorrect.
I first thought that the result is anomalous, but I re-tested it a couple of times (for different speedtest servers) and had similar results, therefore the liklihood of three anomalous results in a row is nil.
I also restarted both the VPS and OpenVPN server with service openvpn restart (the VPS' OS is Ubuntu 14.04 64 bit), same result.
How is this possible?
This is the connection speed of the VPS (455Mbit/s,256.91Mbit/s):
Best Answer
This was to do with the OpenVPN server's compression feature, meaning that more data can be sent at once.
This, therefore, meant the connection was faster. To confirm this, I disabled the compression feature and had this speed:
...whereas with compression enabled, consequently had this speed:
It seems that had I used a standard VPN other than OpenVPN I wouldn't have seen this significant speed burst.