If you have a hard drive as your main storage, and in particular a raid array of smr hard drives, it's worth checking the 'pre-allocate disk space for all files' check box in the connection settings. it keeps disk fragmentation down and lowers raid thrashing a shitton when downloading large media files. You won't notice if it's just you using your one hard drive, but it made a huge difference on my raid5 smr setup.

I've only set the interface to use my VPN, so I'm very interested in any advanced suggestions as well.

As stated above, make sure to bind Qbit to your VPN's ethernet adapter. Other than that setup search plug-ins/Jackett and enjoi the best torrenting software there is.

Use Vuetorrent theme for webui

Port forward

Also don't set anonymous mode, it's not useful and gives you worse performance

I can't recall what theme I installed, but a darker theme is always nice. Found this after a quick search: https://draculatheme.com/qbittorrent

@kaladininskyrim @piracy damn, no responses?

Change the Max up and download speed, click on them on the bottom right corner

Also set Max active torrents

@kaladininskyrim @piracy use aria2c