Pulse Secure VPN -- Slow on Windows 10, fast everywhere else?

VPN
1

We started using Pulse Secure pretty heavily a few months back, but are having performance problems on Windows and the PS customer support just seems lost.

For example, a customer on a 300Mbps connection will be able to get 150Mbps+ on a Mac or Linux host, but that same customer will only see 30Mbps in Windows. These are high-end Dell and HP laptops, wired or wireless doesn’t matter.

We’ve had a lot of people working on this over the past few months and made no progress. Even using a completely stock MS Win10 build (no endpoint agents, no AV, etc.) has the same result. Mac and Win hosts are connecting to the same VPN server, using ESP. All the system policies I can find are identical.

We’re running 9.1.9 and have tested 9.1.10 and .11 with no change (this is not the old speed issue that was present back in 9.1.7).

Is anyone using PS having the same issues? NOT having the same issues (e.g. getting “full” speed on Win10?)?

2

Open PowerShell in an elevated shell (Run as Administrator)

Copy and paste this into it:

Disable-NetAdapterBinding -Name * -DisplayName “Juniper Network Service”

It basically disables an old binding that is not required to run Pulse Secure.

3

Are you doing any split tunneling? I’ve noticed almost the opposite issue on Mac vs. Windows (whereas Big Sur is getting ridiculously slow speeds). I’m wagering that has to do with the fact I’m currently not split tunneling though.

4

There was a comment on a Patch Tuesday thread where someone said they had to disable RSC for their Pulse connection. This link has the instructions to disable, and although talks about 1703, could be some you could try.

5

This has been an ongoing issue for over a year.

We have spent 100s of hour with Pulse troubleshooting.

We have disabled the Juniper Network adapter.

6

Thanks, yes this is the “old” problem that I was referencing in my post. Unfortunately not the issue that we’re having! It is kinda funny to see that Pulse Secure is still using a driver developed in ~2012 (Win7) for the client though.

7

This has been the fix in our environment.

8

https://kb.pulsesecure.net/articles/Pulse_Secure_Article/KB43833

If you do the following it will automatically apply:

Install/Upgrade to Pulse Desktop Client 9.1R5 (Scheduled to be released by April, 2020) on end-points and following the steps below,
Login to the PCS Admin page (New UI Only).
Navigate to System → Configuration → Advanced Client Configuration.
Add the following content under “Enter advanced configuration in XML” and Save Changes,

9.1.5



TRUE



9

We are currently not doing any split tunneling at our site. We haven’t upgraded to Big Sur yet, but that’s in the works.

Does that mean you’re getting good speeds on Windows? :confused:

10

I’ll take a look into it, thanks so much!

Edit: seems to speed up my wifi connection a little bit (+3Mbps), but it tapers off as the speed test goes on (-3Mbps). Interesting to play with though! Thanks anyways.

11

Are you getting good speeds through Pulse Secure with Windows? What kind of endpoint hardware? (Laptops or desktops).

Honestly I’d be okay with just finding out that it’s possible at this point!

12

Thank you for letting me know, unfortunately I’m only an site support engineer and I don’t have access to the pulse admin portal.

13

Yeah speeds are decent on Windows, but not anywhere near wire connection speed that someone would get off the VPN. I’d check out how many concurrent people you have on at once, and check the VPN bandwidth, you might be saturating the links perhaps.

14

That’s the thing – I can have my Windows laptop and my Mac laptop connected at the same time, on the same connection. The Mac laptop has great speeds consistently while the Windows laptop doesn’t. Same VPN, same network, same policy. The only thing that’s different AFAIK is the endpoint!