I run a linode in London and another in Tokyo. I access the London linode from my home in Japan via a PPTP VPN, so I can use the BBC iPlayer. It works - but I get a lot of buffering in the iPlayer. It seems to be pulling data down at about 12.5kilobyte/s or so.

Question: if I run a VPN from the London linode to the Japan linode, then from the Japan linode to my home in Japan - am I likely to get better throughput? I am assuming Linode have a fast connection between data centres. My home connection is just a cheap fibre connection - it is good for up to 17 or so megabyte a second for ftp to Japanese sites. (When I use my VPN to London direct, I get about 250KiloByte/s max).

I know, I know, I need to spend some time with trace-route to see where the network bottleneck is - but has anyone actually done this, and seen an improvement?

I have bandwidth to burn, so that isn't a problem.

Many thanks.

Nick

Why don't you just try and see how well it works?

Your ISP probably throttles international bandwidth in order to keep costs down. (Next door in South Korea, international bandwidth is ~10x more expensive than domestic bandwidth. I don't think it would be much better in Japan.) So if you can make your traffic look domestic, you might get better speeds than connecting directly to your London linode.

But don't expect too much, because connectivity between Japan and UK is still rather abysmal. Your packets either have to go East through two oceans and the USA, or West through SE Asia, India, and the Middle East and/or Africa. I'd call it a success if I could get 1MB/s.

For even better results, stop using PPTP. It's very inefficient in high-latency situations. You'll probably get much better speeds with a proper protocol like OpenVPN, or even a chain of simple SSH tunnels (try sshuttle if you use Linux or OSX at home).

Thanks for your help - i shall respond slightly "out of order".



I shall have a look at sshuttle - thanks for the tip. I went with pptp just because it was easy to set up without messing with certs, and because iToys have it implemented natively. But if pptp has latency issues, I should probably bite the bullet and use OpenVPN on the desktop.



Basically because I am not on top of it enough to "just do it" without thinking - I would have to do a fair amount of googling and messing around. Since I am "cognitive bandwidth constrained" - particularly by the time I get to hobby stuff, I thought I would see what others thought first...

Many thanks for your help.

Nick

I haven't heard mention of any special connection between Linode datacenters. As far as I know, traffic just goes over the regular Internet. If what hybinet describes (ISPs restricting bandwidth to sites outside Japan) is the cause, going through the Tokyo datacenter might help. But if it's just general congestion, it probably won't.

You can do a quick test using just SSH on a London host and a Tokyo host. Configure your web browser to use a SOCKS proxy on localhost, port 1080.

Condition 1: run ssh -D localhost:1080 user@your.london.linode from your home machine, and log in to the London host. This is your baseline.

Condition 2: run ssh -L 1080:localhost:1080 user@your.tokyo.linode from your home machine, and log in to the Tokyo Linode. Then from the Tokyo Linode, run ssh -D localhost:1080 user@your.london.linode and log in to the London Linode.

If Condition 2 gives you better results than Condition 1, that's an indication that what you're talking about might be worth pursuing. This method is not necessarily the most efficient, as all traffic is being encrypted and decrypted twice along the way. But it may serve as a rough idea of whether you can gain anything.