[rhuber]

Another fair criticism. We will publish the benchmarks and make them repeatable (which most existing ones I've found don't bother to do). We hadn't done so because Tailscale isn't really seen as a direct competitor to what the Nebula project is doing, but if people want numbers, that's a thing we are happy to provide.

[vgel]

That's fair, if you've been benchmarking but haven't made the benchmarks public / repeatable yet. Too used to software where the authors claim it's fast with no proof or based on heuristics like what language it's written in :-)

[SahAssar]

So "People sometimes ask me to describe the differences between Nebula and Tailscale" and the answer is "performance and scale", but you don't have clear comparisons for those numbers?

[rhuber]

We have an automated set of ansible scripts that spin up large groups of hosts for Nebula performance regression testing, and a while back I added zerotier, tailscale, wireguard-userspace, wireguard, tinc, ipsec, and openvpn to that automation so I could get a sense of where things stand. I spent a lot of time optimizing each of the above options to make fair comparisons, but it was mostly for mine and the team's curiosity, and we weren't interested in playing benchmark-fight with similar softwares of the world.

Publishing repeatable benchmarks is hard, and when doing open source work, it just hasn't been a priority. As I replied above, if I'm going to say it I should prove it, and I promised to do just that.

And a counterpoint: tailscale does mention in the "Tailscale vs Nebula" article on their website that performance is just about the same but similarly provides no proof. This is motivation enough for me to show proof of the opposite, I guess.