I have a personal server I connect to through Tailscale whenever I’m not home, however I’ve found that whenever I’m connecting remotely connection speed drops drastically from 100MB/s to <3MB/s.

I expect there to be some speed loss when connecting over the internet compared to locally, but 3MB/s doesn’t make any sense especially considering that according to a python script I found that uses speedtest.net to test internet speed through a terminal, it reported 109Mbit/s download and and 76Mbit/s upload (~13MB/s; 9MB/s), which aren’t amazing but leagues beyond 2MB/s. Moreover I also did a quick test with a friend of mine briefly using port-forwarding and they reported the same speeds, which tells me it isn’t Tailscale slowing me down.

Is this just what happens when you connect over the internet? What trickery is afoot to allow me to download things from the interwebz using that sweet full 109Mbit/s bandwidth?

  • ryokimball@infosec.pub
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    2 months ago

    Apologies for the lack of detail but I want to make sure you know about the tool traceroute. The speed at which you connect depends on every node between your remote location and home, plus there will be some overhead with whatever vpn is involved.

    • CameronDev@programming.dev
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      2 months ago

      Trace route measures latency, which is not directly correlated with speed.

      I have a tailscale node that is 200ms away from me, but I can still hit solid speeds to it.

      • ryokimball@infosec.pub
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        2 months ago

        Yeah (fully agree) but it would point out each of the hops the user goes through before reaching home, yes? I’m just trying to help visualize where all the bottlenecks could be