Windows seems to add a bunch of latency to tailscale, linux VM on top of windows seems to bypass all that bloat

I was struggling trying to lower latency with my windows 11 tailscale install, with no luck. Ping over tailscale to that computer would return ~180ms, when a direct connection outside any vpn would be in the ~50ms range. (midwest to west coast tunnel.) Windows SMB shares and file browsing and VNC connections would be sluggish as they seem sensitive to bad ping time.

I changed all kinds of network adapter and os settings in windows with no luck. I finally gave up on that and just installed a vmware workstation virtual machine with linux and configured that to only run a tailscale exit node/subnet router, and now connections to that location through that VM are consistently 55ms.

Looks like virtual machines on top of windows bypass any windows network stack bloat, even when connected to the same port that windows was struggling with.

tl;dr If your tailscale ping time sucks and you're running a windows exit node, try using a linux VM. I have it configured to only use 2 cpu cores and 2GB of ram now that it's up and running, so it's pretty light on resources.