Hello,

I've been evaluating the use of Wireguard to replace a setup that uses
OpenVPN. Initial tests look promising in terms of system resources required
(much less CPU than OpenVPN), but I'm encountering a fair amount of packet
loss and I can't see why.

The scenario is a public API endpoint that devices ping with a reasonably
hefty payload. The payload is received by nginx which proxies it over a tunnel
(via public network) to a server downstream.

Wiregard version is 0.0.20190406-1,

The test server is an Intel i5-4460 running Debian, with 4.19.0-5-amd64
kernel.

load average: 2.18, 2.12, 2.12  
%Cpu(s): 25.2 us, 3.0 sy, 0.0 ni, 68.3 id, 0.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 3.5 si, 0.0 st

So basically, the traffic isn't exceptionally heavy and it is pretty stable in
terms of volume, and the machine is not doing anything else.

Looking at the wg0 interface, I see it dropping a fair amount of RX packets.
Doing some maths with /sys/class/net/wg0/statistics, it shows the interface is
receiving about 600KB/sec and around 5000pps. The RX dropped counter is rising
at about 120-150pps (between 2-3%) and this is show up as an error to the
sender which then has to explicitly retry (this is how I became aware of the
problem in the first place).

The underlying eth0 interface isn't seeing a single packet dropped or any
errors.

eth0 mtu is 1500, wg0 mtu is 1420 (haven't touched these).

I've tried raising txqueuelen, raising net.core.rmem_max and
net.core.rmem_default to stupidly high values with 0 difference.

I've tried setting net.ipv4.tcp_rmem='16384 33554432 67108864, increasing
net.core.netdev_max_backlog and net.ipv4.udp_mem but nothing changes. So
rather than try even more random changes, I'm wondering if anybody recognizes
the symptoms, and what the fix is? I think that covers it, but feel free to
ask for other metrics.

The exact same machine using OpenVPN dropped nothing (although user cpu was
closer to 60%).

Thanks,  
Ian.  

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