Hopping VPN servers to seed to random countries--anyone else do this intentionally?

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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I've been torrenting with VPNs for years and never understood how they work together. I just really wish i didn't have to do this, i already struggle enough without the added complexity

Do you have a VPN client with port forwarding and have you configured the port?
- I'm using Proton's VPN client, which does have port forwarding, but it's not currently enabled. Could this be causing me issues?
  Sounds like if I enable port forwarding, I just need to ensure qBittorrent's "listening port" is set to whatever active port the VPN client is using.
  
  Yes, if you're not using port forwarding with VPN you will get very poor speeds.

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)
- Appreciate the advice!
  I'm running Unraid, but still figuring out the nuts and bolts of dockers so this sounds like a handy tool.
  
  Well you're in fucking luck then buckaroo, because a fellow humansperson that goes by the nickname binhex has you all wrapped up and ready to fedex. Now strap yourself in and point your Unraid apps to a little gem I like to call binhex-qbittorrentvpn, mostly because that's also what they call it.
  It's gonna give you a qBittorrent docker that's already integrated with OpenVPN and Wireguard. All you gotta do is give it the proper info for your VPN, and away you go!

Does anyone know why this happens? Do people configure limits based on location in their torrent clients?
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  if that's the case, that feature seems to work rather poorly
- 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?
  
  I certainly haven't done any scientific testing, but I generally don't see the same thing happen when changing servers within the US.

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