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?
EDIT: tailscale status says the connection is direct
The maximum internet speed you get is the speed of the slowest link in between your house, your ISP, any other network in the middle, and the ISP you are using to connect your remote device to the internet itself
On top of that, put tailscale. Assuming packets go directly between home and your remote device, then tailscale should not impact. But if the packets do go trough a tailscale server, like you have no public IP address at home, or CG-NAT, then that will be the bottleneck most probably.
Tailscale on itself isn’t a measurable overhead.
In general, for home network speed, consider your home UPLOAD speed (as that will the seen as “download” speed from outside) not the download speed, which is often many times faster.
Connecting to my N100-based box on my LAN is measurably (and noticeably) slower over tailscale than without. The encryption overhead is not nothing, and it can be meaningful depending on CPU hardware. (To be clear, not OP’s problem, just commenting on “Tailscale on itself isn’t a measurable overhead.”)
No, really, wireguard encryption overhead is negligible unless you have a really old CPU (like a Pentium100 or something).
Whatever slows down your N100 is not wireguard per se, probably some tailscale overhead going trough their servers.
I have a fairly dated rented server, with an Atom D510, 2 cores, which is 10 years old, and accessing it over wireguard or not, I can still max out the network bandwidth without any visible CPU overhead.