OpenVPN performance: how many concurrent clients are possible?

Posted by Steffen Müller on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Steffen Müller
Published on 2012-10-18T15:12:42Z Indexed on 2013/11/02 3:57 UTC
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Performance

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openvpn

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embedded

I am evaluating a system for a client where many OpenVPN clients connect to a OpenVPN server. "Many" means 50000 - 1000000.

Why do I do that? The clients are distributed embedded systems, each sitting behind the system owners dsl router. The server needs to be able to send commands to the clients. My first naive approach is to make the clients connect to the server via an openvpn network. This way, the secure communication tunnel can be used in both directions.

This means that all clients are always connected to the server. There are many clients summing up over the years.

The question is: does the OpenVPN server explode when reaching a certain number of clients? I am already aware of a maximum TCP connection number limit, therefore (and for other reasons) the VPN would have to use UDP transport.

OpenVPN gurus, what is your opinion?

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