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Comment by ac29 | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone comment what kind of throughput a VPN can do on one of these? I assume it is CPU limited.

I like the idea of a private, personally controlled VPN for $5/month, but if the CPU limits it to 10Mbps, not worth it.

If you use softethers own VPN, you can get at least 100Mbit even on a box this small. (tested on OVH smallest VPS)

Unless you're using an abnormally CPU heavy VPN, you should be able to saturate the NIC without issues. Linode has 1Gbit NICs though peering, like always, is a potential problem.

though peering, like always, is a potential problem

Would you mind to explain? I am not sure what you mean.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering.

Grandparent's point is that, depending on where you're trying to send or receive traffic, you might be limited by Linode's (or the hosting data center's) peering agreements, rather than the 1gbps NIC speed.

Thanks - I understand peering and BGP. My question was meant to ask if Linode has any known peering issues.

The internet can't really be treated as a single homogenous network. It's made up of many many smaller networks which connect to each other ("peer"). If you want to get traffic from say a residential connection in the US to a residential connection in Europe, you have to go through the US residential ISP (say Comcast), at least a few exchanges and then through the European ISP. The connections between these networks don't have infinite capacity and can definitely become congested. The network you're on determines the route you can take and hence whether/where you get congestion.

In my experience, it's usually not too big a problem with any major server provider and major ISP in the US until you get to about 100Mbit. At 100Mbit on Comcast, I start to have issues with Europe, depending on the particular AS over there.

Worth noting though that Linode has diverse set of peers so if there are issues they're more likely to be with the ISP on the other end than with Linode: http://bgp.he.net/AS63949

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