If you’ve been following Tailscale at all, you know we’re really just a bunch of geeks who care a lot about internet connectivity. One thing we love to talk about is NAT Traversal. That’s one of the core value-adds with Tailscale: we tamed NAT . Not every network is friendly, but Tailscale can still find a path in a wide range of conditions. That’s not the only important thing for an internet protocol: the data plane also has to be performant.

Over the years we’ve been investing in making Tailscale fast. We started by increasing TCP throughput on Linux devices . Then we made significant breakthroughs in wireguard-go to surpass 10Gb/s on bare metal. We later leveraged segmentation offloads to increase throughput over 4x for UDP-based applications. Alongside these improvements to our data plane, we built primitives like Tailscale Peer Relays , which can improve network performance in tricky conditions .

All of this has made Tailscale practical for more performance-sensitive workloads.…