Volume of idle traffic

Hi,
I wonder what idle traffic Tailscale consumes on user’s side?

I tried ZeroTier and it’s traffic is rather high - more than 4MB per 24h, which is poorly appropriate for my LTE provider tariff…

Have you found any answers to this? And ways to minimize it?

I don’t remember details but Tailscale is less hungry than ZeroTier regarding idle traffic.

There are a lot of factors that can play into this:

  • How often visible network changes occur
  • How often LTE connections flake
  • What applications are doing that might produce traffic

Tailscale is an L3 network so there’s a large class of broadcast traffic that it doesn’t carry that with L2 networks could contribute to increased ambient traffic.