It's probably a stupid question... But if I notice I'm not getting much upload activity on my seeds, I'll often intentionally just hop over to a random country and see what happens. For example last night I noticed that my uploads had been limited to 1 or 2 <100kB/s peers for the last few days while connected to a US server. Clicked over to a Venezuelan server and almost immediately got about 20 connections that have been sitting between 5-10MB/s total upload ever since.

Makes me feel like an international Johnny Appleseed, except with media and stuff. 😎 Though it's a little surprising to me that there would be such a huge difference in seeding effectiveness depending on where your VPN's endpoint is. Whatever works I guess!

The only downside is it can make web browsing and shopping a bit of a pain. But that's my own fault for not taking 10 minutes to figure out how to set up split tunneling or just hosting qBittorrent on my media server...

EDIT: On rumba's advice I enabled port forwarding in my VPN and qBittorrent client, and now all is well.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 19 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Does anyone know why this happens? Do people configure limits based on location in their torrent clients?

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 14 points 4 days ago (2 children)

It's probably torrent clients doing a ping test of peers to check latency. Ops VPN server replies to the ping so they look close, even though they're not.

I can't imagine a client that would ship an ip2geo db to bother trying to look up locations. Just doesn't make any sense.

[–] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 7 points 3 days ago

can't imagine a client that would ship an ip2geo db

qBittorrent shows country flags next to the peer IPs, so they likely do have some ip2geo db.

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 points 2 days ago

if that's the case, that feature seems to work rather poorly

[–] LodeMike 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Presumably it's automatically set by the torrent client. Maybe it's an IP thing. Has Op Tried changing between servers of the same country?

[–] dmention7@lemm.ee 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I certainly haven't done any scientific testing, but I generally don't see the same thing happen when changing servers within the US.

[–] LodeMike 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Someone else commented it being a ping thing, where the exit server responds. I think I agree with that. Whats the user agent for these peers?

[–] dmention7@lemm.ee 3 points 4 days ago

Sorry, not sure if this is exactly what you're asking, but scanning through the peers I'm connected to now it's around 75% qBittorrent.