Answered: Abysmal Torrenting Speeds

[Halp]

I'm completely new to all this. I wanted a VPN mainly to obscure torrent downloads from my ISP without reducing speeds by more than 5-20%. I'm in the US and connected to the Montreal server to test a download on a fairly popular linux tutorial. Speeds were about 15 MB/s. I restarted the test on the same file and when the download started to spike up, i realized I was still using Montreal and disconnected. At the same time, I was messing a bit with the VPN settings. Speeds immediately dropped and never got past 15 KB/s. I tried different servers like London, different torrents, reinstalling qBittorent, and trying to return the settings to normal with, even using the reset networking button. The worst part is this 15 KB/s cap exists even while I'm not connected to any servers at all, so I really fucked this up. Everything else works properly and my internet speeds are 930 Mb/s offserver and up to 260 Mb/s onserver. I'm on windows 10 and haven't tinkered with windows defender or firewall. These are my VPN settings.




Wondering if the problem lies here or if there is anything I could do to fix it or at least repair my regular torrent speeds before I installed the VPN.

 

[PP Stephan]

Does this 15kb cap exist even when the vpn manager is not running?

Is some kind of third party security software installed on your computer?

 

[Halp]

Does this 15kb cap exist even when the vpn manager is not running?

Is some kind of third party security software installed on your computer?

Hi, it's a fairly fresh windows install with no other security programs installed. The cap still occurs after I restart the computer and the vpn manager isn't running.

 

[PP Stephan]

Not sure what is causing this then. It certainly doesn't have to do with the VPN.

Is this cap only happening in the torrent client? Are you sure that you did not throttle the download speed in the client? (In qbittorrent that is easily accidentally done by clicking on t he "speed-o-meter" in the bottom bar).

 

[Halp]

Yes it's just the torrent client. Maybe i'll try different torrent clients later. I think the problem might have originated when I first turned on default port forwarding, yet it remained after I turned it off. Maybe my ports are still messed up since then? I'll see if I can do something about that too.

 

[Halp]

Not sure what is causing this then. It certainly doesn't have to do with the VPN.

Is this cap only happening in the torrent client? Are you sure that you did not throttle the download speed in the client? (In qbittorrent that is easily accidentally done by clicking on t he "speed-o-meter" in the bottom bar).

I'm sorry to have blamed the VPN. I checked qBittorent and found out the button I pressed which I thought converted dl units from MB/s to KB/s was actually turning on an alternative rate limit of 10 KB/s. Sooooooooo dumb of me. The VPN is still taxing my speeds by about 40% but it's nothing I have to worry about on gigabit internet. I do not know if the VPN overhead would be as proportionately high if my max speeds were lower to begin with. I wonder if you guys have tested this before. Thanks for leading me in the right direction earlier.