Reducing Tailscale’s binary size on macOS

https://tailscale.com/blog/macos-binary-size/

by notpushkin • 3 years ago

131 30 3 years ago

zacwest• 3 years ago

Generally on Apple platforms the move here would be putting the shared binary into a dynamic .framework rather then trying to eliminate the shared dependency. Is this a limitation of authoring it in Go that it has to be entirely static?

hn_go_brrrrr• 3 years ago

It could also be a legacy of a lot of the team coming from Google, which statically links everything except glibc.

xxpor• 3 years ago

I'm surprised Google isn't using musl then at this point.

mihaip7• 3 years ago

(I’m the author of the post)

The solution we ended up with was partially a matter of the minimum change to fix the issue, and partly because we have a lot of platforms to cover with a small team, so the fewer platform-specific concepts we have (frameworks in this case), the easier it is to maintain.

manmal2• 3 years ago

As a user I’d prefer faster startup over shaving off a couple MB tbh.

hansvm• 3 years ago

Even if so that takes benchmarking on the target systems. Linking can be fast compared to reading a few extra MB from disk.

saagarjha3• 3 years ago

Calling dlopen is perhaps one of the slowest way to bring in libraries on Darwin.

CharlesW• 3 years ago

As a Tailscale user, nice work! I applaud the effort and appreciate the result.

tarasglek2• 3 years ago

Guys, please figure out a way to reduce your footprint on openwrt.

11452 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 11.2M Sep 1 2021 /usr/sbin/tailscaled

7612 -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 7.4M Sep 1 2021 /usr/sbin/tailscale

I love tailscale, but it forces me to use usb sticks on most of my openwrt routers.

mihaip7• 3 years ago

There is a way to build an even smaller version of Tailscale for embedded systems, though there are some trade offs with regards to ease of use and security. https://tailscale.com/kb/1207/small-tailscale/ has more details.

tarasglek2• 3 years ago

Method described gets most of the win from UPX. That's not applicable on openwrt as it already uses lzma on filesystem level. Switching to UPX would cause excessive ram usage as binary would be in anonymous memory and no longer be backed by filesystem pages.

newman314• 3 years ago

I seem to remember reading that upx had a performance impact (startup times?).

@mihaip, have you been able to measure any changes before/after?

mihaip7• 3 years ago

upx is not used in the macOS build (we only mention it as a possibility in https://tailscale.com/kb/1207/small-tailscale/, which is for embedded systems), so I have no done any benchmarking with it.

duskwuff2• 3 years ago

1.5 MB for a stub binary which does nothing but load and call a symbol from another file seems a little excessive in its own right.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 3 years ago

Agreed. Strangely discussions of bloat sometimes trigger snarky replies:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34732782

preseinger• 3 years ago

bloated is relative and subjective but the only context where an 11MB binary could be considered bloated is embedded

hard to take seriously the idea that 11MB is bloated in a normal linux server or user desktop environment

mihaip7• 3 years ago

The main binary also contains Tailscale’s GUI (onboarding, auth, menu, notifications, etc) so it does a little more than that.

mrpippy• 3 years ago

Plus, it's a universal binary with x86_64 and arm64 slices.

duskwuff2• 3 years ago

Oh, if that's the case then 1.5 MB seems much more reasonable. Never mind.

duped• 3 years ago

That's pretty normal for statically linked executables unless you're aggressively stripping and removing things (which is hard to do)

least• 3 years ago

Somewhat tangential, but ever since a recent update of the MacOS tailscale client, I've been unable to connect to any other exit nodes. I click on the exit node I'd like to connect to and it just silently fails. I tried making a shortcut as well that would connect to that node and it also fails. I've verified the exit node itself is working correctly on other devices, it only fails on the Macbook.

Has anyone else encountered this issue?

mihaip7• 3 years ago

Can you sent a message to support@tailscale.com about this and include a bug report ID (option click on the Tailscale menu icon and choose Debug -> Bug Report…)?

mihaip7• 3 years ago

One change that went into 1.36 is that you can no longer use an exit node while advertising one (https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/issues/3569). The Mac UI was not updated for that in time, but the next release the menu items should be disabled correctly.

ysleepy• 3 years ago

I'm surprised they didn't go for the binary size analysis tools like

https://github.com/google/bloaty

Or goweight.

Reducing Tailscale’s binary size on macOS

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