Compression tests

OpenVPN has built-in support for LZO compression, if compiled properly. All Windows binaries have LZO compression available by default. In this recipe, we will show what the performance is of using LZO compression when transferring both easily compressible data (such as web pages) and non-compressible data (such as photographs or binaries).

Getting ready

We use the following network layout:

Install OpenVPN 2.0 or higher on two computers. Make sure the computers are connected over a network. Set up the client and server certificates using the first recipe from Chapter 2, Client-server IP-only Networks. For this recipe, the server computer was running CentOS 5 Linux and OpenVPN 2.1.1. The first client was running Fedora 13 Linux and OpenVPN 2.1.1. Keep the configuration file basic-udp-server.conf from the Chapter 2 recipe Server-side routing at hand, as well as the client configuration file, basic-udp-client.conf, from the same recipe. The recipe was repeated with a second...