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Tips on speeding up remote connection to personal server? (pawb.social)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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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

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[–] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Connecting remotely to your home devices is dependent on your home internet connection's upload speed, which is usually a fraction of the download speed.

Then add the overhead of the VPN (Tailscale) and how direct of a connection it's able to make.

Then the connection of the device you're testing from - it may have some bandwidth limitations.

I just did a quick test - copy a specific file from a local server to my phone - just enabling Tailscale made that copy take twice as long, so it's definitely adding significant bandwidth constraints (could be an Android limitation).

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Tailscale, which is wireguard is pretty lightweight protocol wise, so the overhead is usually not significant in my experience.

    However, some devices don't accelerate the crypto well, which can dramatically reduce speeds. My pi4 definitely struggles with it.

    At 3mb/s, I would question if OP is getting relay'd, or possibly hitting some pretty bad packet loss.

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