Service Improvement: OpenVPN DCO on Windows!

Windscribe’s OpenVPN speeds on Windows have received a boost with OpenVPN’s Data Channel Offload feature!

With OpenVPN’s Data Channel Offload feature, the data channel encryption and decryption are offloaded to kernel-space, letting the kernel do the work instead of dealing with it in user-space. This saves on copy operations from kernel to user-space and back and uses multi-threading.

Windscribe app users on Windows 10 20H2 and newer using Windscribe’s app version 2.12.x or newer (released September 2024 as Guinea Pig builds and November 2024 as stable build) benefit from OpenVPN DCO’s speeds by default when using “UDP”, “TCP”*, “Stealth”, and “WStunnel” protocols in-app. The “UDP” option is recommended for best speeds.

Users on older versions of Windows will continue to use Wintun.

These are the kind of speeds our users were able to achieve using OpenVPN DCO:

A hat-tip to our community members “Database” and “Webenezer Scrooge” for their feedback regarding our OpenVPN DCO implementation.

*A note for those using the 'Circumvent Censorship' feature. It does not currently work when using the TCP protocol due to missing functionality in the OpenVPN DCO driver. If you require use of the TCP protocol and this feature, you can add `ws-use-openvpn-wintun` to the Advanced Parameters setting to force the use of the wintun driver.