After my recent internet upgrades I ended up with a new dilemma. A good dilemma, but still.
For a while now I have been running Tailscale on all my devices. It handles all my internal services and lets me connect to everything on my home network from anywhere without having to think about it. For privacy on top of that I added the Mullvad VPN exit nodes that Tailscale offers as an add-on. Five dollars a month, integrated straight into the Tailscale network, pick a city and go. No toggling anything off, no conflicts with my internal services. It has been a great setup.
Then I upgraded my home internet to gigabit. And suddenly I started noticing something. On my phone, without the VPN, I was pulling 800 to 900 megabit down. With the VPN on, more like 500. And something in my brain did not like that.
I kept telling myself it was probably in my head. But I wanted to actually know for sure.
So I did some research and thought it through properly. And the conclusion was pretty straightforward. On a phone, do I actually need gigabit download speeds? Am I going to notice the difference between those numbers when loading a webpage? The answer is no. At those speeds the bottleneck is never my connection. It is the server on the other end, or the screen, or just how fast things can render. The gigabit matters when I am downloading something substantial on my computer or my NAS. On a phone or tablet, even streaming HD video, it simply does not matter.
What I had was not a performance problem. It was a psychological one. I upgraded to gigabit, I could see a faster number without the VPN, and some part of my brain decided I was being shortchanged even though in practice I was not missing anything.
The rational answer is obvious. Keep the VPN on. It is more private, more secure, and the speed difference is not something I will ever notice in real use. I just needed to actually verify that before I could accept it.
VPN stays on.