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.
Yes, if you’re not using port forwarding with VPN you will get very poor speeds.
Well dammit, that was it. THANK YOU!
I feel pretty stupid for overlooking something so simple, but since qBittorrent never indicated any kind of connection error, I didn’t even think to dig into such things.