Slow Downloads through Wingate

[keithwilliams]

The Problem

We are using Wingate 6.6.2 as our Internet proxy server and have had no real problems with it in the past.

However at the beginning of this year we went Live with a new software package that requires us to connect

Via RDP over the Internet to our head office in another country. What has been noticed is that when files

are being downloaded from head office to our local network the download speed is quite slow, our collegues

in europe have said that they're able to download files faster than that and something may be up at our end.

Wingate setup

We have a Wide Area Network using a single domain connecting several sites with my Office as the hub of the

network. To connect to the internet we now have a 20mb cable connection, between our network and the

internet we have a sonicwall firewall. Our Wingate server has a single network card and is sat on our local

domain and configured with the LAN IP of the Firewall as its default gateway. All other default Gateways are

set to the Internal routers for our network. I have set a group policy up to redirect the internet traffic

to the IP address of the Wingate server. So for Browsing the setup works with no problem. On the Wingate

server itself there are a few rules for websites that should be cached. ENS is installed but does not have

bandwidth control enabled. We do not use the wingate client.

If I set a route up on my pc to point to the terminal server on the internet directly out to the firewall

and bypass the wingate server I can get a download speed from the terminal server of around 400kbs. However

as soon as I remove that route and use the Wingate server the download speed I get from the terminal server

is reduced to around 100kbs. So although I can add a route to my users computers at our local office this

doesn't help my remote users who need the wingate server to connect to the internet. Do you have any advice

about what I can check on on the wingate server to see what is causing this slowdown?

Thanks in Advance

Keith

[adrien]

Hi Keith

just to summarize, you are seeing a slow-down for NAT traffic going through WinGate across a WAN. The slow-down is seen in file-transfer over Remote Desktop. So presumably you're using a local drive that is made available as a resource to the remote server you're connecting to?

One issue with throughput is latency. If there are a lot packets going back and forth to transfer data, then latency has a big impact on throughput, since often packets must be acknowledged before the next one is sent.

If you ping the remote RDP server from the client via WinGate, what is the response time? Compared to directly through your external gateway?

Regards

Adrien

[keithwilliams]

Hi Adrien,

I've been copying a 10mb file to and from the documents folder of the remote terminal to the local disc of my pc. When I'm doing this The terminal server 2008 gives the rate of data transfer. The slow latency that has been noticed has also been seen when printing documents from the remote terminal server. If I put a direct route out the firewall on my pc to the gateway terminal server I can get a data transfer rate of at least 4 times that of without the route. As for pinging the server the actual gateway terminal server is hidden from pings but I can ping the server/router in front of that. The ping time I get for this is 30ms I get roughly the same response time if I ping my Internet router from within the remote terminal service session.

edit: Also All traffic to the terminal server goes on port 443 as it's across the internet.

I'll see if I can get some more ping time responses and post those tomorrow.

edit: Whichever way I try to ping the external server/router I'm getting roughly the same response times. which is around the 30ms time.

cheers

Keith

[adrien]

Hi Keith

there's something funny going on with the moderation on this forum... it asked me twice now to approve a post by you but it's not showing here or anywhere I look.

If you're having trouble posting could you please email me at adrien at qbik dot com

Regards

Adrien

[Nev]

there's something funny going on with the moderation on this forum...

Sheesh, if its funny for you, what hope have we? :))

[keithwilliams]

I edited the second post with additional information.

Keith

[adrien]

Hi Keith

is there any chance of having a look on that WinGate server with remote desktop or teamviewer?

It's very odd you should see such a marked slow-down when WinGate is only packet forwarding.

If you are able, send details to our support desk at support@wingate.com

Regards

Adrien

[keithwilliams]

Adrien,

I've sent the details to that email address.

Keith

[adrien]

Hi Keith

received thanks, will get back to you on that ticket.

in the meantime I just had a hunch - if you can enable bandwidth control in Extended Networking in WinGate, but not create any rules / restrictions does that make any difference? It makes packet sending take a different code path.

Regards

Adrien

[keithwilliams]

Adrien,

That all seems to be working ok now. I'm not getting any problems with the NAT interfering with anything else.

Thanks for the help last Friday.

Keith

[logan]

in the meantime I just had a hunch - if you can enable bandwidth control in Extended Networking in WinGate, but not create any rules / restrictions does that make any difference? It makes packet sending take a different code path.

Man, I wish I knew about this one a few years ago :).

[adrien]

actually it wasn't that.

the issue was that RDP was going over the HTTP proxy to a web-based Terminal services gateway. The proxy computer also had some AV on it that had a LSP-based web filter in it.

So that was adding to the latency. We instead set up a ENS redirect through to the TS gateway, and hosts entries to fool the RDP client to connect to WinGate instead. That was a lot quicker.

[logan]

Ah right. That makes much more sense.