New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
VPN and Ping?
Hey guys, just wondering.. what, if any, impact does your ping to the server which you're using as a VPN make?
Example:
2 servers. 1 within 50 miles from my home. 1 on the other side of the globe.
Ping to server near home < 50ms
Ping to other side of globe <400ms
If they both have similar speeds going through, what difference does this make?
Yes, I am a noob, go easy on me :P
Cheers
Comments
The maximum speed of a single TCP connection is limited by the receiving end's TCP window (i.e. buffer) and the RTT
MaxSpeed <= Rwin / RTT
Ping =
Latency from Home to VPN + Latency from VPN to server.
Therefore. If you're 200ms away from the VPN, and the server close to your home is 150ms from your VPN, your resulting ping would be roughly 350ms.
200 + 150 = Ping.
Latency from Home to VPN + Latency from VPN to server.
Although OpenVPN compresses packets, which helps, I doubt it helps the ping. Though I may be wrong?
I'm not sure what exactly helps the ping but something does, I don't know how compressed packets would help ping but ping for me through my VPN is certainly lower than my ping to the server + servers ping to the other server. Black magic?
I find my Ping to the US is greatly improved when I go through a VPN, I think its because it goes through higher bandwidth? maybe.
@Daniel, your latency would get lower if your VPN has better peering to the destination than your home ISP does.
To answer your question, if the speeds are similar and that's all you (or your usage habits) care about, no difference. Your experience with websites, youtube, downloading, etc. will be practically the same. The latency, i.e. lag only comes in when you're doing something where that matters. e.g. if you were in a multiplayer FPS game, and you tried to shoot someone before they could shoot you...if they are closer to the game server than you are via your VPN, you could be dead before the game server even received your click to shoot. Another example is if you were using your VPN to work on remote servers via SSH, etc. --- the echo lag--time between you type a key and it shows up on screen--could get very annoying at 400+ ms.
Yea, better don't try to SSH over a geostationary sat uplink - Its hell slow
Based on a suggestion here, I tried
moshwhich features some sort of local echo/predictive combo that makes the lag almost disappear, for a 200+ ms connection to Estonia. You should give it a go the next time you're stuck on a sat link