I’m not very au fait with torrents, but my VPN supports port forwarding and I’ve read that it improves the speed. So I’ve set it up to forward a port to me, set it up in my router to go to my PC, and then set that port inside qBittorrent.
I used a tool to test it, and it said the port seems to be closed.
I figured I should be able to telnet locally into that port, however I can’t even do that. Is qBittorrent actually listening? Or does telnet not work due to the VPN (open VPN into mullvad)?
And does it actually matter? I’m a bit confused. Testing torrents I get 3-10mb with the vpn and 15 (my bandwidth max) without.
You’ve got two ports that you need to test to make sure they’re open. The first is the port through Mullvad’s vpn server. See this doc (https://mullvad.net/en/help/port-forwarding-and-mullvad/#troubleshooting) for ways to test it depending on which OS you run.
The second is the port through your home network router. See this general troubleshooting guide (https://www.reddit.com/r/torrents/comments/rjfwe7/comment/hp36hoj/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) that u/brickfrog2, one of the r/torrents mods, provides people with torrent issues. Specifically look at the parts dealing with port forwarding, opening ports, and testing to make sure the port is open.
As far as speed, using a faster vpn protocol, like wireguard, will generally have the most impact on speeds. Whether you’re port forwarded through the vpn server of your provider can mean the difference between uploading well vs. not at all.
What happens if you don’t port forward through the vpn server is that peers looking for file pieces can’t find qbt once you become a seed. All the location data for qbt that’s available to peers through trackers or the trackerless DHT network (or PeX) reflect the IP and port number of the vpn server, but that port is no longer open once you finish downloading and qbt goes into listening mode.
Incoming traffic from the peer’s client is unable to reach qbt, and qbt isn’t broadcasting it’s presence, so no connections are possible. This is why using a torrent-friendly vpn provider like Mullvad is essential if you want to be able to upload once you become a seed.
Open ports may not actually improve up/down speed but it could. It gives you the ability to connect to more peers as some won’t connect without a forwarded port.
Thanks, that helps a lot. I found it incredibly hard to figure out how to configure my VPN, I managed to get it working with OpenVPN and I set up firefox to use socks5 and I do the same thing in qbittorrent because I don’t want everything to go through vpn I want to be selective, but I don’t know much about wireguard and I didn’t realise the port forwarding was just for seeding. I am very confused why I can’t telnet into qbittorrent locally on that port though to test it, the firewall is disabled and qbittorrent is in the firewall exception list anyway
I’ve always thought you couldn’t upload with SOCK5 but I get pretty great speeds.