I recently acquired a Flint 2 router which I connected to our German Telekom modem/router. I installed PIA (Wireguard) on the Flint router and chose the usual servers (German, Dutch), the way I have always done. I tested the ip address and checked for DNS leaks and all was well. I then disabled the PIA app on the Macs, iPhones and iPads since I no longer needed them. Then after a few days I started noticing that on my Mac the download speed was very low (around 5 Mb/s; I have a 170 Mb/s fibre optic connection). I played around with DNS settings but none of it made a difference. I checked against another Mac and this one had perfectly acceptable speeds (anywhere from 90-150 Mb/s). I compared the network setup on both …. identical! Then I noticed I had forgotten to disable the PIA app on this machine, so I ran the app on the problem Mac and low and behold, all of a sudden it was fast again, despite have two instance of PIA running (one on the Mac, one in the router). To make matters even more puzzling, the iOS machines all have fast internet connections without running the stand-alone app. Can anyone make sense of this and perhaps explain what the best course of action is? I do not wish to run two instances of PIA, I want it to run centrally, that is after all why I bought the Flint in the first place.
Its hard to tell. It could have been the server was just overloaded and because you established a second PIA instance via the app then that device chose a different server?
Try changing the wireguard config to another location but still not far from where you reside and if the speeds drop again then login to your router and stop/start wireguard to establish a new connection, if it still runs slow, again change the sever of the wireguard config.
There's also MTU which can be a factor. You can change the value on your VPN Dashboard by choosing your tunnel and clicking the gear/cog icon. Also make sure you are running the latest firmware.
It could be clearly mtu here because you use 2 tunnels maybe 3.
The difficult part is figuring out what protocol your isp uses... You need to accommodate on this aswell , dhcp is ok, but pppoe is basically a 'third' tunnel, which is 8, 1500-8=1492
Most isp have a mtu limit you must not exceed, often that is 1500, with pppoe 1492.
A single wireguard tunnel takes up 80 size as packet size.
So on your flint 2 client: your maximum mtu is 1500-80=1420 lower is fine too, but you need to accommodate with the tunnel under it on your laptop or pc aswell.
On your pc or laptop where you have another instance running use 1420-80, it is important mss clamping is also enabled on the tunnel in the Flint 2, the reason is if it somehow still exceeds, it fragments it into smaller pieces.
You need to go into advanced options, then navigate to network -> firewall edit the zone of the wireguard client and check mss clamping
Just a note: please do not go below 1280, at this stage ipv6 will break, and below 1240 ipv4 will break, the higher the mtu the faster the speed, but isp will slow down if it exceeds the limit.
This is too technical for me, though I will try your suggestion. However, why do I get great speeds if I use Wifi on iOS, but not when I use the lan on my Macs? Also, why do I get great speeds on my Macs when I actually run another VPN app?
It could be overloaded on the server as mentoid above.
But it can also be something else, have you tried a different cable and how long is this distance?
On the same location and cable does a different device behave differently?
If there is a switch involved any ports with non connected cables?, please remove them, on my own network I learned this could slow down even if it looks so unlikely, the switch can take energy on a rather bad quality cable which slow things much more down even when it shows as not connected.
I tried different cables, it made no difference (after all, I used the same cables before I bought the Flint and they worked fine). Overloaded server makes no sense if iOS devices using the same server have very fast connections.
