Tailscale and Netbird 400+% RAM usage

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hello everyone.
I've recently purchased a Netgear R6220 after careful research to ensure it would fit my needs.

I've been using it with 24.10.5 with my Alcatel 4G LTE modem device plugged into the USB port providing the WAN.

I had planned to use Wireguard or OpenVPN to allow me in from the outside, mainly to read and write files to my NAS drive, and to use the router as an exit node.
That was before I learned about the CGNAT issue, which renders these two options hopeless given my situation.

After doing some more research I was recommended to try Tailscale. At first I had been using a Gargoyle firmware, but I was having issues with Tailscale. I was able do everything I wanted to do, but when a Tailscale connected device like a Android phone finished what it needed to do and closed the connection it caused the router to go into a weird state. It wouild become unresponsive for a time, stop broadcasting SSID, stop accepting new wireless connections (existing ones remained connected but lost internet) and internet would be lost on the ethernet LAN wired connections too. This lasted about 2 mins then it would return to normal but it was very annoying for others in the household, so I needed to fix it.
The Tailscale version that Gargoyle supplies was an old version, so I thought that might be the problem. That's when I decided to flash up "real" OpenWRT (24.10.5). This provided access to a newer version of Tailscale. BUT now whenever the Tailscale service was running, LuCI became very unresponsive, taking many seconds to change pages, often timing out or aborting page requests.
Upon looking in the status page, I could see either the Tailscale up, or the Tailscale service reportedly using HUNDREDS of percent of RAM, which surely can't be right.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on there?

Anyway, it was unusable, so I tried the same setup on another router (a Netgear WNDR3700v5) and got exactly the same result, so can't really blame the router. At this point I was so fed up that I decided to give up on Tailscale and look for an alternative. This is when I came across Netbird and thought I'd give that a go.
I installed Netbird and then spent ages trying to figure out why it would not work for me. Then I found the information that the version that installs with OpenWRT 24.10.5 is an old version that does not support exit nodes. I could not install a newer version because they are written in a newer version of Golang which is not supported in 24.10.5. My next step was to flash up OpenWRT 25.12.0-rc1 and install the newer version of Netbird that comes with that.

Now although Netbird seems to be running ok and I can do everything I intend to do with it, I do still have the slightly concerning matter of the OpenWRT status page reporting that Netbird is using HUNDREDS of percent of the memory, which is impossible.
Should I be worried about this?

2

Screenshot of Netbird in OpenWRT.

Note that apart from sluggish responses in SSH console for Netbird commands, I do not seem to be facing any problems. Everything seems to work fine, and LuCI is not having any significant sluggishness as it was with Tailscale before.

3

go programs overcommit memory massively. nothing to fix.

4

Your router is low end, you are using an USB dongle and go programs that surely will make the router sluggish.

OpenWRT 24.10.5 is indeed stuck at an older Go versions and therefore NetBird 0.59.13 is the last NetBird update for that version.
But that should support an exit node.
But on this low end hardware your experience will be less than favourable

5

Thank you for the responses so far. Glad to know what I am experiencing is nothing to worry about, and enjoying using Netbird.

One more thing for those who know about these things.
I read the document here:

which is very well written and informative, with explanations of how to perform the steps either by SSH or in LuCI. I followed it so far, but I have not performed the steps of creating a new unmanaged interface or creating a firewall rule. My question is whether this is really necessary? The system seems to work fine without it, and I can join the LAN from remote devices using Netbird to the router and access all my devices that are connected to the router which is all I really want. I don't have other users joining in, or certain devices or any VLANs that I want to exclude, so do I really need to create the unmanaged interface and set up the firewall rule?
Back when I was using Tailscale, I also skipped that step and was still able to use it perfectly fine...except for the strange router behaviour when I remote client disconnected which caused me to move to Netbird. Could somebody please explain if the unmanaged interface and firewall rule is mandatory or just an option? I have no problem implementing it if it is required, but just don't see the need at the moment. Thanks

6

It is mandatory if you want to connect to lan clients and use it as an exit node or want to use it together with e.g. PBR, especially if you want a direct connection as opposed to relay.

So yes I would just follow the instructions :slight_smile:

Oh and thanks for the compliments :slight_smile: