7. VPN Performance

Figure 10 shows a composite Chariot plot of PPTP throughput test results in both Local-to-Remote and Remote-to-Local directions that I took using the BOSS.

Figure 10: BOSS PPTP throughput

The PPTP client was a 1 GHz Celeron-based notebook running WinXP home and using Microsoft's built-in PPTP client. Note that these results were obtained with no other traffic running through the router and no other active applications besides Chariot and its endpoint running on the test pair machines. The 3.2Mbps best-case throughput is enough to keep up with most broadband connections, but less than half what I measured for the USR8200. Streaming performance wasn't as good, however, with the 500kbps test stream rate cut just about in half and about half the data lost.

Though I couldn't test IPsec tunnel performance, it's sure to be considerably lower than PPTP throughput, due to the increased compute requirements of IPsec's stronger encryption and the lack of any hardware encryption capability in the ASAP / BOSS' design. Both products say they support up to 20 IPsec tunnels, but I doubt most users would be happy with the tunnel throughput with even half that many running simultaneously.

IPsec VPN Performance Test Results

See details of how we test.