That's normal with VPNs. You are sharing bandwidth with other users when you use it, so you lose speed.
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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In my experience Mullvad is a blazing fast VPN, to me this seems like something else. I never had less than 500mbit speeds using it.
I experience closer to 100mb/s generally. Though this is plenty for me. I'm really just glad my ping stays below 30ms.
understandable, thanks
Very standard with any VPN, I'd say 150Mbps is quite good compared to the competition. You're sending your network traffic through a tunnel to another location, then they're relaying it to other places. There are several bottlenecks along the way.
400 to 150... to the speedtest server?
my bad that wording was fucked
when not connected, i get 400mbps. connected to mullvad, i only get 150mbps
what
it drops from 400mbps to 150mbps when using a speed test
The mullvad server might have a gigabit connection, but that shared across all their users.
WireGuard will get you the best through put, IPSEC is a close second. OpenVPN has a lot of overhead.
Are you using the same server between the two speed tests?
What protocol?
How much speed do you need? That is still a lot of bandwidth. This is from someone with 8 mbps up/ 60 mbps down. So your still way better then I am. I am envious. Well no so much as this is enough for me.
Other thing to keep in mind is that bandwidth is only half of performance, latency is the other. So check that too.
yea latency was like 30ms so good enough. 150mbps is usually plenty, I'll just be turning it off when downloading a game for example
I don't know the limits of the mullvad client but you might want to look into split tunneling and just allow steam (or whatever program) to avoid the VPN... the privacy benefits are going to be marginal, the latency and download speed penalties will be blatantly obvious.
As dark ark say, the official mullvad app allows split tunneling. I have split tunneling enabled for things where I am logged in with my real identity. No point hiding my IP from steam when they have my credit card number with my name.
Have you tried different servers (you can select country and city in the app)? Have you tried it on different days of the week at different times?
That would be my starting to find out where the bottle-neck is. Under optimal conditions Mullvad should get very close to your 400mps (the protocol has some overhead, but in a speed test with "full" packages that's only about five percent of your bandwidth). Of course they can't guarantee optimal conditions on all servers all the time, but it's also not rare for them to get close.
The distance to the Mullvad server doesn't matter much when it comes to bandwidth. Hence, unless you're gaming and actually need a short ping, you can try servers that are further away.
If you don't get anything higher than 150Mb/s at any time with any server, we'll indeed have to look for technical issues on your side.
Mullvads no good anymore especially since they removed the ability for choosing a temporary port to open.
so what do I switch to?
I've never used a VPN where I didn't get a big drop in speed. Privacy and security don't mesh well with speed in most cases.
weird, amongst vpns I've used, Mullvad was the fastest one