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…
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.