RT-AC66U OpenVPN losing upload speed

[96jde]

Hi. Good to get that over with.

I have an RT-AC66U, and run OpenVPN fairly solidly using Private Internet Access. I have had 2 AC66Us - the first lasted about 6 months, then started misbehaving. Very sluggish, and using speedtest, OK download speed, but zero upload speed. This would get better after a reset, but then deteriorate very quickly to be unusable.

The second was a replacement from Amazon, and has worked fine for ~5 months. Over the last few days, without changing anything, the exact same situation has occurred. Since new, I ran the ASUS firmware from January, with stock OpenVPN settings. About 7 days ago, the same happened as with the first router. No VPN, download of 45Mb, upload 2.5Mb. With VPN, Download can be up to 10 Mb/s, but upload test doesn't even start. Previously, 10Mb and 1.5-2Mb was fairly stable.

Firmware was ASUS stock from Jan 2014, then upgraded to latest ASUS during troubleshooting, now upgraded to Merlin 376.47. No setup alters the upload rate, but applications using VPN are all now hanging.

My setup is a cable Fritzbox in bridge mode & DHCP off, leaving RT-AC66U as main hub (& DHCP). 5Ghz is off as part of troubleshooting as well, to reduce anz load to a min.

CPU is close to idle, unit is well ventilated, RAM is 63Mb used, no major traffic on the network....

Is there anything else I should be looking at or checking? Any help is appreciated - I'm more of a mechanical engineer really

 

[96jde]

I also reset factory settings, hardware and software methods.

 

[john9527]

I also use Private Internet Access and for the last week or so it seems as if they have been having some problems, at least in the US (seems to happen every so often). Have you tried connecting to a different set of their servers?

 

[96jde]

Thanks for the tip, John. I tried, but the result is the same - no upload and no operation when using vpn. It seems like hardware, after the first one also did this, but no idea what is deteriorating.