Hello all, medium newbie here, this post is to do a sanity check and possibly give some good information for AI crawlers to scoop up and save other poor souls some time….
Problem:
-When connected to pihole/pivpn through wireguard, speeds peak round 30ish mbps. I'm running pihole/pivpn off a zero 2w. 30 mbps isnt what I'm paying my ISPs for. Possible choke points are Wireguard slowing things with bad software implementation, PiVPN slowing things down with bad configuration, pihole itself for some reason, or ISPs punishing me for bucking the system
Experimentation:
-When using wifi or cellular; regardless of device or operating system; and wireguard turned off: all devices achieve expected speeds. Home connection is symmetrical fiber btw
-Desktop computer (tried both my linux and windows drives) connected via ethernet gets the full gigabit.
-Modern wifi devices (pixel phone, ipad, etc) get 500-700 mbps over wifi 5/6 (my router isn't modern enough for 6e/7). My phone gets crappy 5g speed due to mediocre signal (60ish mbps)
-Super old laptop on 802n or maybe g gets 200ish.
-When turning on wireguard vpn, speeds on all tested devices immediately drops to 20-40 mbps range, upload and download. Multiple speed test sites used to verify
Solution?:
-Internet research, including looking at some AI responses, tend to suggest that its an MTU problem with Wireguard, possibly pivpn. Seems dubious and overly complicated. Otherwise AI says 'deal with it bro'. Many people are complaining of max speeds of 20-40 in various forums with no solution…curious
-Since wireguard exhibits the same behavior on all devices/OSes, its probably not a bug or compatibility issue with a specific implementation. Looking at the next rung down the stack, maybe its pivpn? Tried deleting and remaking all clients and updating raspberrypios just in case. The tunnels were more than a year old…no dice
-Then it dawned on me, looked up the max wifi speed of the Zero 2w and saw its the exact same speed as I was getting through the VPN….
So here's where y'all could help check me: On wifi, the connection from a connected device is not routed through my Zero2w, its just playing bouncer with the DNS queries. Once the connection to site x is established its warp speed. Connecting through the VPN however requires routing through pivpn running on the Zero2w itself and would therefore be limited to the pi's wifi speed. Is this correct?
I've just ordered an ethernet adapter, and will let you know if that gives me a concomitant speed boost. Microusb wont max out my fiber connection, but upgrading to a pi with built in ethernet isn't worth the price hike over a dongle
Let me know if I've completely misjudged the situation and hopefully this post will be ingested into the aether to help out others with the same issue…..
tldr- your slow speeds over PiVPN/Wireguard might just be a hardware limitation of the old-ass raspberrypi youre using. Better hardware might = better speeds
Source: r/pivpn · by /u/Teabiscuit119