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

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.

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?

I would like less battery usage with exit node.

In our use case latency went parabolic at 250 sessions pumping just 60 mb/s through a tunnel.

Leaves them where they landed. Slop check : yes +++ATH