Thanx for helping me out here.
So resume to understand VPN Connections:
- With a "default" PureVPN connection setup in VPN Manager be aware that there is an unbelievably massive security issue, because all ports are open (including SSH 22)
Correct, but the solution is simple and the Iptables rules/solutions are all mentioned in my thread I linked in my last post, so if you follow it, you should have no concerns about security.
- I have tested your Speedtest IP's (How do you get/know these IP's anyway?) from 9:00 AM to 12:00 AM, the fastest one had a 25 Mbit/s. 3 of them had a 1 or 2 time >23 Mbit/s hit, but later tests on the same IP's came up with 0-5 Mbit/s. The selected host at "Hosted by" was quite of influence in the tests.
I obtain the IPs by resolving the DNS (nl1-ovpn-udp.purevpn.net) with Convert Host Name to IP Address or Find IP address of a host - e.g. find IP address of host name of. When I had the same issues a year ago, the pureVPN live chat support suggested me this site and to use the direct server IPs instead of the DNS. That is why I came around with this proposal for solution. You should be aware that no cheap VPN provider will guarantee you perfect unlimited speed. There will always be limits... I mostly don't hit the limit with my 40MBit ISP speed, but you will hit it quite often with your 90MBit connection. Though, 25Mbit is still not so slow and you saw that I get more than 30 MBit with my speedtests (okay, it was night time, and perhaps the routing is somehow different in germany for some providers). It is certainly shit that you have 23MBit at one time and later only a very limited connection on the same server :/. This is something I would try to bother their support over and over again. Apparently netherland servers are used pretty frequently hmmm... You have 7 servers, I hope you can find one, which is more reliable than the others. Besides this, I have also my favourite swiss server as primary connection and it gets sometimes slow when streaming IPTV, and for this case I have specified the other IP's as additional 2nd, 3rd, 4th connections to cycle between then for this particular case. VPN Manager offers you all these possibilities with its great featureset.
I don't know about the influence of the "Hosted by" providers -_-. Again something the PureVPN Chat could help you with, or answer it.
- When I just used "nl1-ovpn-udp.purevpn.net" instead of an IP, 90% of the tested speeds were less than 4 Mbit/s
I assume that this is because nl1-ovpn-udp.purevpn.net assigns you in 90% of the time one of the slower servers. As I showed in my yesterdays speed test, there was one server (206.123.147.2), which was extremely slow no matter how many speed tests I did. In your case it is apparently in 90% of you connection attempts with nl1-ovpn-udp.purevpn.net that pureVPN decides to resolve it to 206.123.147.2 for your connection and then you end up with a slow connection. This was just an example. It is likely that my slow 206.123.147.2 is in your case one of the other 7 servers, may be even at the same time... who knows what the reason is... perhaps it is my ISPs routing, or the daytime of your connection attempt, which results in one or the other server being slower (more loaded with users/transfers) than the other servers --> Cycle the VPN connection to another server to avoid being limited.
- So 70% of the times the RPi makes a VPN connection, the speed does not hit above 4 Mbit/s.....I would say that VPN is not working for me? Or are there other settings (Routers, DNS) which are influencing the poor VPN Connection speed?
You said that you had connections respectively speedtests which exceeded 25MBit. So there might be no issue on your side at all. It might be just the simple reason, that PureVPN has too many people at the same time transferring big amount of data on the servers you want to use. It can be just as simple as it is... like a shared internet connection. Perhaps you should simply choose another VPN provider (at least for a testing period).
I am no network guy, though I think it is surely possible that routers / firewalls etc. influence the speed of a VPN connection. But in your case you had connections of 25MBit, so that means your setup is able to handle at least these speeds with OpenVPN... I don't know why the same setup would limit you to 1MBit some minutes later... sure... everything is possible and troubleshooting can be a pain in the ass, but it soulds more like an issue on PureVPNs side. And I can tell you that I also had speed issues... And I do also have sometimes speed issues without a VPN connection, because my ISP has technical issues... same things can happen to PureVPN servers. But especially the additional layer (VPN tunnel and VPN Provider) in your internet connection can obviously become an additional factor of bandwidth limitation. This is something you cannot avoid, but ideally you could lower the risk of bandwidth limitation by using a business 1000€/month VPN provider who is specialized on fast and reliable VPN connections for companies or so. PureVPN, IPVanish etc. are quite cheap for the service they provide you, and still they are quite fast and reliable... everything is a matter of reasonability or proportionality (not sure which expression is the correct one for this in english 
)
infinity85, do I need to update the Pure connection list? I can't think why the DNS name would make a difference as both resolve to the same IP. I can believe that Pure workload balance, which maybe what's happening here?
No I don't think there is anything you should update as long as the servers list is up-to-date (I do get successful connections if using your default PureVPN list, so there is no general problem. Perhaps some countries are down, but in this case the people who use those countries could/would mention it to you).
I'm sure the DNS name makes no difference. As you say... it resolves to the same IP. But in this case there are simply 7 Servers (7 IP's) behind it and sometimes you simply get assigned to one of those 7 servers, which is quite slow. There's nothing you could do about it, other than to resolve every single country's DNS to its IP's and then to make seperate *.ovpn for every single IP. Afaik there are more than 140 countries listed at PureVPN... and If some of them have 7 or 10 or 5 seperate IP's behind the DNS', then you end up with up to 500 *.ovpn... that would make no sense at all in your addon :D. Your UserDefined function is totally appropriate to handle it manually, like I described some posts above. It is as you said, the PureVPN workload balance is kind of poor sometimes during establishing a connection.
[hr]
I thought let's install a spare Windows 10 PC with a PureVPN connection on my Home Network. Established the VPN connection on the selected the dutch server (no other choice) and did a speedtest on Ookla: and Boooommmm...90mbps...several times
Why is this so fast?
Great to hear that! How did you establish the connection? Was it also via OpenVPN, or did you use the PureVPN software client? PureVPN offers the following VPN connection protocols: PPTP, L2TP, SSTP, IKEv2 OpenVPN-UDP and OpenVPN-TCP and some of them might be easier in encryption (less processing load on you Raspberry, that the other). On LibreELEC you do only have the choice to use OpenVPN afaik. The encryption there might load your Raspberries CPU's more, thus the CPU being the limiting factor. But As you said earlier... you achieved 25Mbit with the Raspberry, so the CPU is capable to cope with at least 25Mbit, 90MBit/s would even be too hard to achieve with a Raspberry Pi, because it has only a 100Mbit (theoretical) ethernet speed, and to make it even worse it is hooked up to the USB interface, sharing Ethernet transfers with USB transfers. Though, according to my knowledge the Raspberry Pi2 and especially RPi3 come very close to the theoretical limit of 100Mbit/s. May be the CPU limits a VPN throughbut to 50Mbit/s max, maybe it does more, just a guess.
When you made the speedtests with your windows machine... did you make comparison speedtests to the same servers at the same time (no matter whether some minutes later) with your raspberry? I could imagine that the raspberry would also have good speeds at the same time and same servers, because I still assume that the sporadic bottleneck is rather on PureVPNs side than on yours.
