Lightway was always designed for speed, and with our latest innovation, Lightway Turbo, we’ve found a way to significantly boost bandwidth for upload and download speeds without latency suffering. Windows users on Lightway UDP can now experience our latest innovation to boost Lightway performance.
With the approach of distributing traffic over multiple lanes, we’re able to send more data simultaneously. This means users with faster networks can make the most of their VPN connections for a faster overall experience. Meanwhile, we’ve also implemented Data Channel Offload (DCO) on OpenVPN to boost speeds.
How does Lightway Turbo work?
Lightway Turbo works by creating multiple tunnels to our servers, each taking traffic to and from your computer. In doing so, we engage multiple cores for processing and can create multiple instances on multiple servers for faster throughput and increased security.
In order to make Turbo feasible, we implemented a few key upgrades to Lightway on our Windows app. Firstly, we implemented custom network driver interface specification (NDIS) drivers to enable kernel bypass; this means we don’t have to copy data out of the kernel to handle it, reducing overhead while boosting performance and efficiency.
Alongside this, we also integrated multi-threading with dedicated read and write. This approach means we can rapidly handle acknowledgments, improving performance on Lightway TCP while we work on bringing Turbo to TCP connections.
DCO: faster speeds on OpenVPN
With all of the changes we’re making to improve Lightway, our proprietary VPN protocol, we’re aware that a percentage of our users still rely on OpenVPN. It’s a battle-hardened VPN protocol that has developed a reputation for being slow—but we set out to change that on our Windows app. By implementing DCO, we’ve revitalized OpenVPN. Anyone using OpenVPN on Windows will see significant performance improvements.
DCO is a modern technique that allows OpenVPN to process data packets on user devices in the kernel rather than traditionally having to copy them into the user space. As for the servers, DCO allows the OpenVPN daemons (that manage the tunnel connections) to operate in the kernel space, too. So we can handle data packets more efficiently and with multi-threading enabled to speed up the processing.
Using DCO allows us to significantly improve the performance of OpenVPN connections, and increase bandwidth and efficiency through multithreading and reduced overhead. In our internal testing, we’ve seen up to 2000% download speed increases in ExpressVPN’s OpenVPN UDP traffic. This means users with capable bandwidth can see up to 2 Gbps download and 1 Gbps upload speeds when connected to OpenVPN.
See the difference for yourself
Lightway Turbo is currently available when using Lightway UDP or the “Automatic” protocol selection on the Windows v12 app. It’s on by default to give users the best possible speeds from the outset, but if you want to toggle it off and on, you can do so under the Protocol tab. We plan to roll out Lightway Turbo to other platforms soon. Note that Turbo cannot be used with split tunneling at the moment.
If you want to see the performance difference for yourself, connect with Lightway UDP (Turbo off) and run a speed test, then reconnect with Turbo on and run another.
Users who will see the most benefit from this feature are those with super-fast networks of over 900 Mbps, and those connecting to VPN servers that are large distances from their physical location.
DCO on OpenVPN is now available on the latest version of the ExpressVPN app for Windows. Due to incompatibility, DCO will not be implemented on apps for other platforms.