Making Tailscale Faster

(tailscale.com)

30 points | by yarapavan 5 hours ago

6 comments

  • iscoelho 11 minutes ago
    In my opinion, this is Tailscale's largest issue.

    It is slow. It cannot achieve speeds of greater than 1Gbps on clients systems (Windows & Mac), where you'd normally see it being used. On Linux, it struggles to achieve 10Gbps even when using a synthetic large packet benchmark [1]. With an IMIX benchmark, it would not be competitive whatsoever.

    This problem is fixable. WireGuard achieves higher performance (Kernel vs Userspace implementation) and IPsec implementations can achieve 100Gbps/400Gbps (DPDK/XDP). Zero-copy networking.

    From this blog post, I can say Tailscale still seems to not have the appetite for that, which is a shame.

    [1] https://tailscale.com/blog/more-throughput

  • fitblipper 16 minutes ago
    I used to LOVE tailscale. Then I put wireguard on my home network exposed to the internet with a dynamic DNS provider and it immediately became irrelevant. Not only is raw wireguard more stable (I don't have to fight the DNS issues on my mobile phones) it feels faster and is amazingly simple to set up.
    • PorciiVorbesc 9 minutes ago
      Care to share your setup? I did some research into self hosting my own wireguard for my nuc and rpi, before ultimately settling on Tailscale because of how much simpler and plug-and-lay it was to add/remove devices compared to self hosting wireguard, not dealing with certificates, maintenance, etc.
  • CharlesW 1 hour ago
    I wonder if the post's focus on Linux/Android is just because that's where they started, or because they're leveraging techniques that are only possible on Linux/Android?
    • chrash 1 hour ago
      it sounds like they’re leveraging Linux features that may not exist 1:1 on Darwin and NT
  • aborsy 51 minutes ago
    I would like less battery usage with exit node.
  • ykurtov 1 hour ago
    In our use case latency went parabolic at 250 sessions pumping just 60 mb/s through a tunnel.
  • time4tea 1 hour ago
    Leaves them where they landed. Slop check : yes +++ATH
    • api 1 hour ago
      Also makes it sound like they were the first to do stuff like NAT traversal, which goes WAY back.