Hey all,
My wife and I both work from home. My current networking setup looks a bit like this:
Internet ↔ Router ↔ Unifi Security Gateway ↔ Main Unifi Switch <—> Upstairs Unifi Switch <—> Wife’s Laptop (all via gigabit ethernet).
I also have three Unifi APs.
My internet seems to deliver excellent speed to my laptop (a MacBook Pro) but inconsistent performance to my wife’s machine.
The catch is that my wife’s machine connects to a remote desktop via a VPN.
I’m wondering two things:
What is the best way to test my network performance?
Are there are settings for my routers or switches that I could tweak to optimize for VPN based remote desktop traffic?
Thanks in advance all.
Standard internet browser based tests are, fast.com, speedtest.net…
To just test within your LAN look for iperf3. You could also test with public iperf3 servers but I would just use the browser based tests above.
Generally just test wired, wireless is not consistent. You could still test it though.
I agree that there’s more to it with the wifes VPN, but you only have control of your network.
If you haven’t already, I would also attempt to tune the wifi channels on your APs to the least congested, don’t use auto.
I suspect the bottleneck is the wife’s VPN. If everything on your network is behaving as expected and she’s only having issues while connected to her VPN it’d sound like her VPN. I assume the VPN client is on her machine itself and not on your actual network equipment? If that’s the case your network doesn’t really even know what it’s handling, it’s just passing packets along. The only exception would be is if you’ve got IDS/IPS enabled and it’s for some reason capping itself trying to inspect the encrypted VPN packets.
I assume the wife’s laptop is using a wired connection. Either way, on her laptop, test internet speeds using speedtest.net as rockker60 suggested. If the results are adequate, then the bottleneck is the VPN.