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…

  • myersguy@lemmy.simpl.website
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    9 hours ago

    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…

    Advice: Look up Gluetun and dockerize your torrent/vpn setup. Makes things real simple (including moving where it is hosted, should you choose to)

    • dmention7@lemm.eeOP
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      8 hours ago

      Appreciate the advice!

      I’m running Unraid, but still figuring out the nuts and bolts of dockers so this sounds like a handy tool.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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    10 hours ago

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

    • Shadow@lemmy.ca
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      9 hours ago

      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.

    • Kairos
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      9 hours ago

      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.eeOP
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        8 hours ago

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

        • Kairos
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          8 hours ago

          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.eeOP
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            6 hours 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.