Latency / DNS issues - Shadowsocks & OpenVPN

[pizzatonno]

Hi everyone,

I've switched from pfsense+ to opnsense a few months ago and so far very impressed & satisfied with opnsense.
However, I'm running into an issue, rendering my setup almost useless.

I currently need to use a proxy to access a lot of websites & services, so I have shadowsocks-local running on the opnsense box. I have tested the shadowsocks server from multiple devices/sites and it always has a strong connection.

I also want to run my traffic over a VPN... So I have chosen a VPN provider and set up the openvpn client with socks-proxy option. The VPN connects just fine, no problems there!

But now the funky part... The connection is VERY unreliable. When connection is stable, RTT is around 400ms. At this moment a speedtest is good. I'm sad to say that this stability only takes place a small percentage of time. Most times when traffic starts picking up, latency starts spiking up to 1000,2000,even 15000ms.... This usually goes hand in hand with packet loss but not necessarily. I configured the traffic shaper but this didn't seem to change anything. I turned off services like suricata and zenarmor to see if they were causing problems, no difference..

Another issue is that at some times sites are unreachable, even with a "stable connection". So I looked at Unbound DNS but couldn't find anything particular in the config and logs...

So here I am, after a few weeks of trying to pinpoint and solve the issue. I have reached the limits of my knowledge (& googling) to solve this issue. I really hope someone here is willing to help me troubleshoot and solve this. Please let me know if further information/configs/logs are needed.