speedtest : tincanvpn versus openvpn

[saket424]

@kcratie and @vahid-dan,
We did a speedtest of the two vpn implementations and the openvpn interface seems roughly 2.5 times faster compared to the tincan interface. Any ideas on how we could improve the throughput/performance ? BTW, This is using the new code in the 'bh1' branch and no TURN server is involved -- strictly p2p tunnel. Also the cpu usage is also higher for tincan but let us focus on the bandwidth throughput first.

[TINCAN]
root@Alien15:/home/anand/tincan-stuff/ipop-vpn/speedtest# node run.js 172.31.0.206
speedtest plugin initializing...
Beginning download...
connecting to 172.31.0.206:10043...
connected.
Download speed: 1.62 MB/sec, 12.96 Mb/sec
Beginning upload...
connecting to 172.31.0.206:10042...
connected.
Upload speed: 1.44 MB/sec, 11.52 Mb/sec

[OPENVPN]
root@Alien15:/home/anand/tincan-stuff/ipop-vpn/speedtest# node run.js 10.8.0.108
speedtest plugin initializing...
Beginning download...
connecting to 10.8.0.108:10043...
connected.
Download speed: 4.13 MB/sec, 33.04 Mb/sec
Beginning upload...
connecting to 10.8.0.108:10042...
connected.
Upload speed: 3.48 MB/sec, 27.84 Mb/sec

[kcratie]

@saket424
There is room for performance improvement in parts of Tincan and this is on our to do list. In the meantime make sure the log level is set to WARNING or ERROR as the logging can be a slowdown. Regarding the CPU usage, Tincan tunnels are DTLS encrypted so this adds to the overhead. However, we will look at this comparatively to OpenVPN to see if there are other factors that can be addressed.

[bmullan]

@kcratie

There is a recent White Paper by Researchers at the University of Gent titled:
Scalability evaluation of VPN technologies for secure container networking

Where they present results for performance of:

• OpenVPN
• TINC
• WireGuard
• ZeroTier
• SoftEther

You may find the results interesting...
Brian