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.

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. All of this has made Tailscale practical for performance-sensitive workloads like continuous integration, agentic workflows, and remote development environments.

On Linux and Android, Tailscale now leaves small packets where they landed, leading to a roughly 5% speed-up. We shortened packet queues, reducing waiting time and memory overhead. We passed the savings on to subnet routers and app connectors.

Now we’re boosting throughput for app connectors, subnet routers, and exit nodes with multi-queue technology (landing in the second half of 2026). We’ll also preview throughput and memory overhead improvements in upcoming stable client releases.