A faster DERP relay for Tailscale and Headscale. Same protocol, same clients, half the hardware.
What is Hyper-DERP?
When Tailscale or Headscale can't establish a direct WireGuard connection between two peers -- because of NAT, firewalls, or CGNAT -- traffic falls back to a DERP relay. Tailscale ships derper, a Go-based relay that works well for most setups.
Hyper-DERP is a drop-in replacement for derper. It speaks the same protocol, works with the same clients, and needs no changes to your Tailscale or Headscale configuration beyond pointing the DERP map at a new address.
The difference is performance. If you're running DERP as a permanent relay path -- for industrial networks, enterprise deployments, or any setup where the relay carries sustained traffic rather than occasional fallback -- Hyper-DERP delivers more throughput on less hardware.
Performance
| vCPU | HD Peak (Mbps) | TS Ceiling (Mbps) | HD/TS |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | 3,730 | 1,870 | 10.8x |
| 4 | 6,091 | 2,798 | 3.5x |
| 8 | 12,316 | 4,670 | 2.7x |
| 16 | 16,545 | 7,834 | 2.1x |
HD on 8 vCPUs outperforms derper on 16. Across the board, HD matches derper's throughput on half the cores -- a 50% compute cost reduction for a relay fleet.
Full benchmark results -- 4,903 runs across throughput, latency, tunnel quality, and peer scaling.
Get Started
Install from APT (Debian/Ubuntu, amd64 + arm64):
curl -fsSL https://hyper-derp.dev/repo/key.gpg | \
sudo gpg --dearmor \
-o /usr/share/keyrings/hyper-derp.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hyper-derp.gpg] \
https://hyper-derp.dev/repo stable main" | \
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hyper-derp.list
sudo apt update && sudo apt install hyper-derp
Or build from source. Then point your DERP map at the new relay and you're done.