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.

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[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 14 points 3 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 2 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