But if instead I grab even an old crappy PC circa 2008 to support the OpenVPN client, it blows the pants off the router. Why do I say that? Because I've gone so far as to configure a PTP (point to point) OpenVPN tunnel between my router (ASUS RT-AC68U) and a VPS, and even if I disable encryption entirely, just a plain ol', in the clear, tunnel (can't get any simpler), I still get the same crappy performance.

It's having to constantly jump from user space to the kernel and back (aka ring changes), for the purposes of constructing and managing the tunnel, that's the *primary* culprit, w/ these others issues making marginal differences. Some of you have suggested this due to hardware-accelerated changes for openvpn settings.įor those of you who have manually configured ExpressVPN in your routers, would you be willing to share a pic with your current VPN client settings that you are having very good results?įWIW, after a lot of testing, I'm convinced the primary reason that these consumer grade routers perform so poorly when it comes to the VPN (just about any VPN) is due to ring changes, NOT the lack of hardware compression, not various buffers sizes, and a million other settings.

I also just purchased an Asus RT-AC86U and I am wondering if will truly perform better when connected to VPN. I understand that apps have their own configurations and may not necessarily perform the same in different routers but is there a way to find out what an app’s settings are to try to somehow replicate them in another router in hopes of getting similar performance results? I have tweaked some of the settings based on suggestions posted in other threads but have not had experienced any improvement in download speeds.

When I try to set up the same server settings on my Asus RT-AC5300 (Merlin’s latest FW installed) I only get about 10Mbps download speeds. The ExpressVPN app is built on a DD-WRT platform but I was curious how some (or all) of its settings could be translated in the same router that uses Merlin’s FW, instead? I have the ExpressVPN app installed in my Asus RT-AC87U and it performs very well with averages download speeds for the server I use at about 30Mbps (ISP ~60 Mbps).

Install expressvpn on router